Or the Bull Kills You (31 page)

‘Stop!' he shouted. ‘Stop!'

But his words were lost in the barrage of noise from the aerial blasts above. The
petardos
had started now and were spitting and flaring along a string before they gave an enormous, deep-sounding boom at the foot of the
falla
statue and the first flames began to lick the sides of the brightly painted wood-and-foam structure.

There was a scream. Moreno was almost in reach, pushing towards the front of the crowd at the foot of the
falla
statue.

‘Out of my way!'

The crowd melted before him. Ahead, just a few yards from him, Moreno had stopped and turned to face him through the growing gap in the throng. But he wasn't alone. Pressed against him, immobilised by a tight headlock, and with Moreno's gun pushed against her temple, was Almudena.

Cámara stopped in his tracks, unable to move. Moreno was grinning at him, his eyes flashing with a manic stare, his lips trembling. Beside him, Almudena was ashen faced, too frightened to make a sound, struggling to keep herself upright as Moreno pulled her from one side to the next.

The revolver was still in Cámara's hand but it was too late to raise it. Moreno spotted it and pressed his own pistol harder against Almudena's head.

‘Drop it!' he screamed. ‘Drop it or she's dead!'

Cámara raised his other hand slowly, as though to show he'd understood, and then started to bend at the knee in order to place the revolver on the ground.

‘Hurry up!' Moreno barked.

Cámara knew that without a gun there was no way he could confront Moreno, no way he could resolve this. Yet even with one in his hand there was little he could do: a clean head shot was almost impossible with a weapon like that, but even if he was lucky with his aim the bullet would cause Moreno's body to spasm, making his hand squeeze and so pulling the trigger. There was only one place he could be hit: straight between the eyes. That way he would fall down dead instantly, with no spasm, no pulling the trigger. But only a top marksman could even attempt such a shot.

He knelt down further, keeping his eyes on Moreno as his hand reached the ground and he unwrapped his fingers from the revolver. Almudena stared at him with incredulity. Was he going to abandon her now like this?

And then it happened – so suddenly that it left him breathless. A splash of red and Moreno slumped to the floor, a dead weight. His lifeless arms were still hooked around Almudena, and she was dragged down with him.

There was a scream. In an instant Cámara was lurching forwards, his arms reaching for Almudena, to raise her up from Moreno. He turned her over; her face was bloodied from the mess ebbing from the hole in the centre of Moreno's forehead. Her body felt limp in his arms. He checked; she was unharmed.

As the flames of the
falla
statue intensified, the crowd moved in around them, the moment of immediate danger apparently gone. He looked up, then back at Almudena; her eyes were resting on his, unblinking. Her mouth opened; she seemed about to speak to him.

‘Almudena!'

A man's voice was heard shouting in panic close by.

‘Almudena!'

She moved. Feeling appeared to be returning to her. Yet still she kept her gaze on Cámara.

Someone pushed through from behind them. A pair of arms thrust through and suddenly she was hauled away. Cámara let her go without any resistance. From the corner of his eye he could see her resting her head on the other man's chest, her body shaking as the fright and shock took hold.

A hand was placed on his shoulder as he crouched by the wreckage of Moreno's body. Cámara turned to look: it was Beltrán, with a Sako sniper rifle hanging from a strap over his arm.

‘Good job you ducked like that,' Beltrán grinned.

‘Thank God it was you,' Cámara said.

Monday 20th March

His feet felt swollen, beating the polished red marble pavement with a heavy clomp as he took each step. He had to be careful not to slip – the surface had only just been washed clean and he felt his toes curling instinctively as he tried to keep his balance. Around the corner he could hear the sound of high-powered water hoses being used to wash away the fiesta. The first light of dawn was beginning to break out towards the sea, but already it was as if
Fallas
had never taken place. As was the case every year, after the final bonfire had burnt to the ground, and long before the
falleros
had stumbled home for the last time, a cleaning operation had got underway, transforming the city, under the guise of darkness, from the party capital of Spain into just another Mediterranean port town.

An army of sweepers and rubbish collectors worked like bees in a seemingly chaotic fashion, but always managing – miraculously, it seemed – to get the job done by the next morning, so that after more than a week of paralysis Valencia once again became the nervy, semi-functioning city it usually was. All that remained from the fiesta were a few metal barriers stacked away to one side awaiting removal, or the marks on the tarmac where the
fallas
had burnt to the ground. A few nearby buildings might bear their own personal souvenirs – cracked windows and scorched facades from their proximity to the flames: scars that had to be healed and repaired.

Cámara circled around the Plaza del Ayuntamiento and then headed down towards the baroque, brightly painted building of the Banco de Valencia. The first of the street lamps were beginning to dim as the daylight increased. Across the road a group of tourists – they looked German – was standing outside the front door of a hotel next to their luggage, with every air of waiting for a taxi or bus to take them to the airport. They'd come and witnessed
Fallas
, probably drunk vast quantities of Agua de Valencia cocktails and were now heading home. Probably still half-pissed by the looks of them.

A voice inside wondered why he didn't go home himself. Perhaps if he tried now he might be able to get some rest. But he dismissed the idea. As soon as his eyes closed all he could see was Moreno's face glaring at him, the hole in the centre of his face, and Almudena's ashen features. There would be no rest. Not tonight, perhaps not for a while.

He walked on, as he had done all night, heading down past the old university building towards the Parterre. A group of young people, still clinging on to the party spirit, screeched past him in an open-top sports car, metallic disco music blaring at full volume, a blonde girl in the back seat waving at him drunkenly as they went past. They'd have enough cocaine on them to keep going for another couple of hours, then a quick shower, another line and back into work, fresher than the rest of them in most cases.

He dropped his head and carried on walking. Under a gigantic rubber tree a truck was pulling up to hitch a shuttered
buñuelos
stall on to the back and wheel it away. Even the smell of frying sweet batter – second only to gunpowder in the air during
Fallas
– was being cleansed from the city.

There was a beep: still sitting in his pocket, the sergeant's phone was trying to tell him something. A text message, probably. At this time? He put his hand down, felt for the phone and pulled it out, flipping it open with his thumb.

The text was from Torres:
Roberto is in the Nou d'Octubre hospital. Medics have given leave for questioning
.

Cámara closed it shut and put it back in his pocket.

There was a park nearby and he found himself wandering towards it. A handful of bright yellow freesias shone up, catching the first rays of light as the sun started to rise above the rooftops. Cámara had always liked these flowers. He had bought bunches of them for Almudena on occasion, surprising her at the office with them as he passed through the centre.

As he stood in front of them, staring down at their light, happy faces, he heard a sound. After a brief splutter a sprinkler system coughed into life, casting an arc of droplets into the air, rainbows bursting above his head as they glinted in the sun. He took a deep breath and let the water wash over him, first moving across him one way then another as the machine swept in a semicircle over its patch of garden. In a few moments the droplets had formed streams of water on his scalp, cascading down his neck and soaking into his shirt. Water. Water to wash away the fire, the dirt. Everything.

He listened, straining to hear. And for the briefest of moments the city was silent.

 

‘Maldonado's seriously pissed off. He had a bet running that the Blanco case would still be unresolved by the end of today. He's going to lose a lot of money.'

Torres met him round the back door.

‘It's a weird one, this. Yesterday we spent most of the time trying to get Paco to confess. Today we're questioning little brother Roberto instead.'

Cámara was reluctant to show his face, and strolling in through the main entrance would have broadcast his presence in the loudest of terms. He was suspended, pending transfer to another section. His career in
Homicidios
was over. But still he found himself back at the Jefatura.

Torres pressed on the metal bar of the emergency exit to let Cámara in. He held a cigarette out to him and lit it as Cámara put it in his mouth, his body craving the extra nicotine of Torres's Habanos that morning.

‘Have you spoken to him yet?' Cámara asked.

‘No.' Torres lit his own cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘We're going down to the hospital in a minute.'

He looked Cámara in the eye.

‘Thought I might try and persuade you to come along.'

Cámara shook his head, rubbing a hand over his unshaved chin as though trying to bring feeling back to his numbed self.

‘Besides, we do something irregular like that and the courts will be all over it,' he said. ‘The guy would die a natural death before anyone got round to banging him up.'

Torres nodded. For some reason the technological revolution had bypassed the Spanish judicial system, and cases were still dealt with on bits of paper. Some could take anything up to ten years to be resolved, and it wasn't unheard of for documents to go ‘missing'. Television news cameramen often lingered over the piles of folders and box files that littered the offices of every lawyer, prosecutor and magistrate in the land – a nineteenth-century anomaly in a supposedly hi-tech age.

Torres filled him in on the morning's work: a team was looking into the paperwork linking Roberto's German drug company with the Ramírez bull farm. By the looks of it they hadn't been overly careful to hide anything: sales, if they could call it that, had been carried out through a third party based in Rome. What was difficult to prove was that any money had actually changed hands for the drugs. They could trace them reaching Spain and then the farm, but there was nothing to show any payment for them.

‘Perhaps there was no money in it,' Cámara said. ‘Family thing. Roberto kept things quiet at the drug company and they were simply handed over as a gift. In the end it was in his interests to keep the family business going as well, despite all that talk of being
anti-toro
.'

There were other links to Roberto. Huerta had analysed Moreno's phone, which they'd picked up along with several other items from the corpse. Moreno had erased the memory, but his phone company had already given them a detailed breakdown of all calls made and received by the number over the previous two weeks. A New York number had rung the night before Blanco was killed. It was almost certainly from a public phone, but it tied in exactly with Roberto's business trip to the city.

‘The green light,' Cámara said.

‘Probably.'

‘Roberto heard it from Flores, who'd got it from the editor of
El Diario
,' he said. ‘Blanco's got a big story to tell. That's when he knew.'

‘And triggered Moreno to act,' Torres said.

Cámara flicked his cigarette out on to the waste ground. At least they could smoke in relative peace now – no kids hurling firecrackers about the place. He almost missed them.

Torres took a final drag and they turned to head inside.

‘Any sign of Roberto's phone?' Cámara asked as they walked down the steps to the basement.

‘Claims not to have one,' Torres said.

‘You might want to look into it anyway,' Cámara said. ‘Check the phone companies. You need something to link Roberto to Ruiz Pastor's murder.'

‘Oh, I think we might be all right on that score,' Torres said. ‘Caballero gave the go-ahead for a DNA sample. Quintero is checking it out right now. If it comes back the same as the stuff he scraped from under Ruiz Pastor's nails…'

‘The scratches on Roberto's face,' Cámara said.

‘Ruiz Pastor was a big man. We know he put up a fight.'

‘I just hope to God…'

They reached the bottom of the stairs and started walking down the corridor.

‘Another thing,' he said. ‘I had a quick look at Roberto's bank accounts. Well, his Spanish ones at least – looks like the guy's got money all over the world. Anyway, the day after Blanco was killed, the day he flew back for the funeral and all that, he took a large amount out in cash.'

‘How much?'

‘Ten thousand euros.'

Cámara pursed his lips.

‘Says it was to buy his mother a present. Being away and all that.'

Cámara gave him a look.

‘Yeah. Didn't exactly ring true for me, either.'

‘Money for Moreno,' Cámara said. ‘Payment for his hired assassin.'

‘But how are we going to prove that?'

Cámara remembered the new leaflets at the
Anti-Taurino
League's stall.

‘No sign of Marta Díaz?' he asked.

‘We've got everyone looking for her,' Torres said. ‘And by everyone I mean a couple of squad cars for now.'

‘Right,' Cámara said. ‘Bloody
Fallas
.'

‘Anyway,' Torres said. ‘You better get going, before someone finds you're in the building.'

Footsteps came from the other end of the corridor. Torres looked at Cámara. There was still time to disappear if he hurried. Cámara reached out and put a hand on his chest. There was no point. He was finished here. How much worse could they make it for him?

The footsteps grew louder until finally a face appeared under the strip lights.

It was Pardo.

‘You,' he said to Cámara. ‘Come with me.'

‘Torres has nothing—' Cámara tried to say, but Pardo butted in.

‘And shut up!'

 

Pardo stood and looked out at the city through the smoked glass of his window. It was a clear sunny day outside, and the first sounds of a city slowly waking up after the fiesta came drifting up from the streets below.

‘For fuck's sake, Cámara.'

Cámara shuffled in his seat and closed his eyes for a moment, trying to appear composed.

‘Sir?'

Pardo spun on his heels and bashed into the side of the desk. Cámara opened his eyes with a start and saw Pardo glaring at him.

‘Don't try it on,' he bellowed. He checked himself, as though conscious that he was in danger of losing control, and moved to sit down on the other side of the desk.

‘Do you have any idea,' he said, tapping the tips of his fingers against each other, ‘how many people want to see you disappeared? I mean, not just transferred out of
Homicidios
, but really just out of the fucking police force altogether. Booted out, sent away for good. Never to come back.'

Cámara gave a shrug.

‘The Town Hall wants you out because you've been harassing their staff. I take it you heard, did you? Emilia got back in. Only just, mind.'

‘Did you expect a different result?'

‘It doesn't make things any easier for you. Meanwhile, the Ministry in Madrid is calling up wanting your head for interfering in constitutional affairs, asking what this guy's doing arresting politicians on the Day of Reflection.'

Pardo had started counting all of Cámara's enemies on the fingers of one hand.

‘My boss wants you gone because he reckons you're the most incompetent chief inspector on his staff, who can't even obey a direct order. Even the head of personnel wants you out because you caused an evacuation of the entire building by lighting a fucking cigarette right under the fucking smoke alarm.'

Cámara sniffed. It's coming now, he thought.

Pardo leaned forwards, placing his palms together over the desk.

‘You haven't slept for days, have you?' he said with a change in tone.

Cámara frowned.

‘Moreno, eh?' Pardo said. ‘That must have been tough.'

Cámara fought back the images of the impact of the bullet, the blood spatters on Almudena's face.

‘The DNA test?' he said.

‘On Roberto? Still waiting to come through. Everyone's pulling out the stops for this one. Full backup.'

‘About time,' Cámara said.

‘Look, this hasn't been our finest moment, I admit that.'

Here it comes, Cámara thought: the moment of self-flagellation. But the shit only ever flies in one direction.

‘We all fucked up a bit here,' Pardo said. ‘We've just got to live with that.'

He sat down in his chair and swivelled it from side to side for a moment.

‘How did you know it was Moreno?' he asked at last.

Cámara looked up with a raised eyebrow.

‘The rally,' he said. ‘The night Blanco was killed. They came round to the Bar Los Toros. Once they'd left I later found out they'd packed in for the day there and then rather than carrying on. Said it was out of respect for Blanco.'

‘So?' Pardo said.