The Exile (38 page)

Galíndez put her hands on the door of Adelina Solano's flat and pushed. That wasn't going to work. The door was in bad condition but it would need more than a push to open it. She sighed. Now she needed to call Mendez and ask for authorisation to get inside. They'd have to get a warrant, or contact Adelina's relatives. You could spend days doing stuff like that. She put her hands on the door and pushed again, harder this time. The door gave a little, clearly the lock was badly fitted. Galíndez pursed her lips, weighing things up. All that bureaucracy just because of a cheap lock that might blow open in a puff of wind. She glanced round. There was no one on the landing and the street below was deserted.

Galíndez kicked the door hard, just below the lock. She heard a dull crack as the door swung open, the ruined lock dangling from it. She slipped inside and closed the door behind her.

Adelina's flat had a sad air of neglect, the smell of cabbage and dust mixed with other more complex odours, none of them pleasant. A kitchen sink with a ring of well-established green mould. Beyond the kitchen was a living room, though Galíndez decided living might be too strong a word. Adelina Solano existed here, no more. A table and a single chair by the window, the metal blind drawn and locked. An electric fire by the wall, far too small to provide adequate warmth in a Madrid winter.

On the wall above the fire was a large photograph of a young woman. Galíndez stared, realising she'd seen her before, lying on a mortuary trolley at HQ. It was the young hooker, Zora Ivanova, the girl who shared a DNA profile with Adelina's dead – or not so dead – daughter, Leticia. Galíndez exhaled slowly.
Adelina knew this thin-faced prostitute was her daughter.
That was why she'd said she hoped to have more information for Galíndez. She'd been watching her daughter, photographing her. Galíndez's eyes widened.
She was collecting evidence.

Next to the electric fire was a small heap of newspaper cuttings and Galíndez knelt to examine them. The first was from a Madrid daily,
La Razón
, a picture of a man outside an imposing building, holding his hand up in an unsuccessful attempt to block the cameras. She read the headline:

Husband of the Minister of the Interior Attended Sex Parties

Madrid 19 December 2009

Juan Luis Calderón, husband of the interior minister Rosario Calderón, admitted today under intense media pressure that he attended parties organised by disgraced financier Ricardo Castro despite earlier denials. The parties were held for foreign businessmen interested in investing in Castro's development projects. Witnesses have spoken of drunken affairs with prostitutes brought in to entertain prospective business partners.

‘It is true that I denied attending these events,' Calderón said in a statement drafted by his lawyer. ‘I should have said I was present, though had I realised that these events involved call girls, lap dancers and, in some cases, the use of hard drugs, I would of course, have avoided them. My only wish was to help support a Spanish trade event aimed at creating jobs.'

Calderón refused to say how many of these parties he had attended. He also denied knowing the whereabouts of Ricardo Castro, who has not been seen in public since the Guardia Civil raided his business HQ earlier in the month. Unofficial sources suggest Castro may be in hiding in Bolivia where he has a number of business interests. A brief statement from Minister of the Interior Rosario Calderón said her husband had committed no crime and that his private life was no one's business but his. She herself had no knowledge of him attending these events.

Another piece taken from
El Mundo
carried a similar story, noting that the prime minister had expressed his confidence in the minister of the interior, emphasising that her integrity was beyond doubt no matter how ‘unfortunate' her husband's actions had been. Galíndez hadn't heard about this, and no wonder, she realised, seeing the date. When this story had broken, she had still been in intensive care.

As she got up, she saw a photograph almost hidden beneath the cuttings and picked it up. The photo was of a party, taken through a blurred crowd of revellers. A young woman leaning on a bar, a glazed expression on her face, next to her a man, resting his face against the girl's hair, his arm wrapped around her waist.

‘
Me cago en dios
,' Galíndez breathed. The girl was Zora Ivanova. And although the man's face was partly hidden, it wasn't enough to hide Señor Calderón's identity. She took a plastic evidence bag from her pocket and put the cuttings and photograph inside.

A jumble of letters lay on a cheap plastic table by the window and Galíndez leafed through them. All were dated some time during the past ten days. Adelina must have intended to post these in a batch, since alongside them was a packet of envelopes and a book of stamps. Galíndez took a look at a couple of letters. One was addressed to the King, Juan Carlos, the other to the president of Real Madrid Football Club. All were handwritten, beginning with the words ‘May God bless you'. She could imagine the reception these got from the recipients.

In her letter to the King, Señora Solano noted his failure to reply to her previous correspondence, undoubtedly due to His Majesty's enormous workload, she was sure. Perhaps now, however, his Royal Highness would be considerate enough to consider the case of her daughter Leticia, a baby stolen from her mother at birth against the laws of man and God. For years Señora Solano had searched for her child, sensing with a mother's unerring instinct that she was still alive. And her persistence had finally paid off: she had found her, selling herself on the streets, the prisoner of a group of Bulgarian pimps. If His Majesty would only see fit to order the police to intervene...

Galíndez cringed as the letter became increasingly garbled. It would undoubtedly have been dismissed as the product of a disturbed mind. Adelina Solano repeatedly emphasised the vast wrong done to her, but each time omitted to mention the evidence she'd been collecting.

For fuck's sake. Galíndez shook her head. Adelina's suspicions had been right all along. Working alone, she'd somehow managed to find her daughter. And then, before she could give the information to the police, her daughter was dead. Galíndez looked down at her clenched fist. The bastards killed the girl because she crossed them in some way. Killed her as if she was nothing, gutting her like an animal in the slaughterhouse.

Galíndez continued her search in Adelina's bedroom. She imagined Adelina in this musty box, spending long nights agonising over who she could write to next for help. As if it mattered. No one was prepared to help her. No one except Galíndez, and she hadn't done much.
Why didn't she tell me about the girl?

There were two cardboard shoeboxes by the wardrobe, one on top of the other. Galíndez took the boxes and sat on the edge of the bed to examine them. Inside were more letters, with the letterheads of medical companies. The first was a sheet of thick vellum with a pale blue letterhead:
GL Medical Group, Caring for the Health of Spanish People since 1957
. Dated a few weeks earlier, the letter informed Señora Solano that GL intended to take legal action if she continued to sully their company's name. It was signed by the chief executive, Jesper Karlsson. There were other letters from different companies, but all carried the same message, spelled out in indignant and threatening tones.
We strongly deny your insinuations
...
a matter of conjecture
...
you provide no proof of your unfounded and libellous claims
...
your letter is now in the hands of our legal team
...
legal action
...
defamation
...
we must warn you
...
None of the letters expressed sympathy or offered any sort of advice.

Galíndez checked the rest of the flat to make sure there was no more correspondence hidden amongst the few possessions Adelina Solano had possessed. She found only a few cheap pens and several pads of writing paper. Adelina had spent almost half her life writing letters to people who had never read them, Galíndez thought sadly. But she'd been right and she'd stuck to it. And in the end she'd found her daughter. Galíndez admired her for that. And then she'd died in an accident. How unlucky could you get?

Galíndez took a deep breath. You couldn't let cases like this get to you, that was what they told her when she first joined the
guardia
. You couldn't let them work their way under your skin until every spare moment was taken up agonising over minute aspects of the case. That way, you ended up like Adelina Solano: lonely and obsessed, pursuing a hopeless quest. But it wasn't hopeless. She knew she was right. Galíndez picked up the cardboard boxes and left the flat. Back in her car, she called Mendez at HQ.

‘Hey, Ana, how did Señora Solano take the bad news?'

‘She's dead.' Her voice was flat.

Mendez was as sarcastic as ever. ‘What happened? Did the shock kill her?'

‘She died a couple of days ago in a traffic accident,' Galíndez said, heading for the city centre. ‘Will you do me a favour?'

‘Under the circumstances.'

‘Check out the report on her death for me? You've got her details there, haven't you?'

‘Let me have a look. Yes, I've got them. Do you want me to email you the report or are you coming back to HQ?'

‘Email it, will you?' Galíndez said. ‘I'll work on it at home.'

‘The luxury of secondment,' Mendez muttered. ‘OK. It's on its way.'

Galíndez drove back, deep in thought about Adelina Solano. And the more she thought about it, the more she realised how much she and the late Señora Solano had in common. It was not something that cheered her.

MADRID 2010, CALLE DE LOS CUCHILLEROS

Galíndez paused in the entrance hall to check her mailbox, finding only circulars and junk mail. The projector she'd ordered from Amazon still hadn't arrived, so Ochoa's spool of film would have to wait. In any case, she knew it was almost certain to be a let-down, a movie of his family perhaps, or some ancient porn film. She ran up the stairs and opened the triple-locked door. Inside, she checked the answering-machine. No call from Isabel.

After she'd made a coffee, she sat at her desk by the window and opened her laptop. The screen flickered into life and a message told her she had mail. It was the report from Mendez. No comments, just a cryptic header:
Not quite what you thought?

Laughter drifted up from the bar downstairs and she leaned forward to concentrate on the report into Señora Solano's death. The preamble said Adelina was forty-seven. That was a surprise, Galíndez would have guessed she was in her sixties. She was divorced and though her ex-husband had been located by the
guardia civil
in Zaragoza, he declined to have anything to do with the funeral arrangements. Even in death, no one wanted anything to do with Adelina.

She moved on to the main report. After a paragraph, she understood what Mendez meant in her cryptic header. Adelina Solano hadn't died in a traffic accident.

The report said that at 8.40 on the night of her death Señora Solano was walking along Calle Polvoranca at the junction with Calle Joaquin Turina. As she turned left, passing the Cooperativa Nueva Carabanchel, a car mounted the pavement, dragging her under the vehicle for about three metres. A passer-by, Señor Adebayo Olowanyi, ran to help. As he approached, the car reversed over Señora Solano. The witness said this seemed deliberate since the car then drove over her lifeless body again before speeding away down Calle Guitarra. The witness was traumatised and unable to give a description of the vehicle.

There was no other evidence. No traffic cameras, no CCTV in shops overlooking the site of the accident, no other witnesses. A patrol car reported seeing a light blue car driving fast down Calle de la Duquesa de Tamames coming from the direction of the church of San Pedro Apóstol. Since they were on their way to a domestic violence incident, the officers had not stopped the car and only later became aware of its involvement in the death of Señora Solano.

Galíndez finished her coffee, relishing the feel of caffeine in her system as she tried to picture the driver's escape route after he killed Adelina Solano. She closed the report and opened a map of Madrid, examining the location where Adelina was killed. These were narrow roads in the suburbs, and many were one way. For the car to be going along Calle de la Duquesa de Tamames away from San Pedro Apóstol, it had to have left the scene of Adelina's death down Calle Guitarra and then turned left into Carabanchel Alto before taking a right near San Pedro Apóstol. There was no other route that would place them at the point where the municipal police saw them at the time they did.

The bastards had planned this carefully, Galíndez thought angrily. They ran down and killed Adelina Solano and then took a route as if heading for the city centre before they doubled back towards the suburbs. They must have thought they were smart, planning the escape route like that. But they didn't realise the drive down Carabanchel Alto would take them past the entrance to the Metro. And Metro stations were good things for people like Galíndez. Lots of people coming and going. Busy places. All those people needed a lot of management, you couldn't just rely on staff to keep an eye on thousands of passengers every day. That was why they had CCTV.

She picked up the phone and dialled. ‘It's me,' she said when Mendez answered.

‘Did you read the report, Ana? There's not much to go on.'

‘It's a long shot, but is there a chance you can get access to the CCTV at Carabanchel Alto Metro station?'

A long sigh. ‘I suppose you want it tonight? I'll make a call. Stay by the phone.'