The Flanders Panel (28 page)

“I seem to remember that on occasion that’s exactly what you have done.”

Cesar sighed again, with a pained grimace.

“That’s my daring side, my dear. Sometimes my character just gets the better of me; it’s the scandalous old queen in me, I suppose. A bit like Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Just as well hardly anyone these days speaks decent French.”

They reached Julia’s car, parked in an alley, just as she was telling him about her encounter with Max. The mere mention of the name was enough to make Cesar frown.

“I’m only glad I didn’t see him, the pimp,” he remarked crossly. “Is he still making treacherous propositions?”

“Nothing serious. I suppose that deep down he’s afraid Menchu would find out.”

“That’s where it would hurt the little rat. In the wallet.” Cesar walked round the car towards the passenger door. “Look at that! They’ve slapped a fine on us.”

“They haven’t, have they?”

“Oh, yes, they have. It’s stuck under the windscreen wiper.” Irritated, he banged the ground with his umbrella. “I don’t believe it. Right in the middle of the Rastro and the police spend their time giving out fines instead of doing what they should be doing, arresting criminals and other riffraff. It’s a disgrace!” He repeated it loudly, looking about him defiantly: “An absolute disgrace!”

Julia removed the empty aerosol can someone had placed on the bonnet of the car and picked up the piece of paper, which was in fact a small card, about the size of a visiting card. Then she stood utterly still, thunderstruck. The shock must have shown on her face, because Cesar, alarmed, hurried round to her side.

“You’ve gone quite pale, my dear. What’s wrong?”

When she spoke, she didn’t recognise her own voice. She felt a terrible desire to run away to some warm, secure place where she could hide her head and close her eyes and feel safe.

“It isn’t a fine, Cesar.”

She held out the card, and Cesar uttered a word no one would expect to hear from him. Because there, in a now all too familiar format, someone had typed the sinisterly laconic characters:

Pa7 x Rb6

As she stood, stunned, she felt as if her head were spinning. The alley was deserted. The person nearest to it was a seller of religious images, who was sitting on a wicker chair on the corner, about twenty yards from them, watching the people walking past the merchandise she’d laid out on the ground. “He was here, Cesar. Don’t you see? He was
here.”

She realised that there was fear in her words but not surprise. Now - and the realisation came in waves of infinite despair - she was not afraid of the unexpected, her fear had become a kind of gloomy sense of resignation, as if the mystery player and his close, threatening presence were becoming an irremediable curse under which she would have to live for the rest of her life. Always supposing, she thought with lucid pessimism, that she had much life left to live.

Ashen, Cesar was turning the card round and round. He could barely speak for indignation:

“The swine… the blackguard.”

Julia’s thoughts were suddenly distracted from the card. What claimed her attention was the empty can she’d found on the bonnet. She picked it up, feeling, as she bent to do so, as though she were moving through the mists of a dream. But she was able to concentrate long enough on the label to understand what it was. She shook her head, puzzled, before showing it to Cesar.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“An aerosol for repairing flat tyres. You stick it in the valve and the tyre inflates. It’s got a sort of white paste in it that repairs the puncture from inside.”

“What’s it doing here?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.”

They checked the tyres. There was nothing odd about the two on the left. Julia walked round the car and checked the two on the right, which also seemed fine. But just as she was about to drop the can on the ground, she noticed that the valve on the back tyre was missing its cap. In its place was a bubble of white paste.

“Someone’s pumped up the tyre,” said Cesar, after staring at the empty container. “Perhaps it was punctured.”

“It wasn’t when we parked it,” said Julia, and they looked at each other, full of dark presentiments.

“Don’t get in,” said Cesar.

The seller of religious images had seen nothing. There were always a lot of people around and, besides, she was busy with her own affairs, she explained, laying out sacred hearts, statuettes of San Pancracio and sundry virgins. As for the alley, she wasn’t sure. A couple of locals had been past in the last hour, possibly a few other people.

“Do you remember anyone in particular?” Cesar had taken off his hat and was bending towards the seller, his overcoat over his shoulders and his umbrella under his arm. The image of a perfect gentleman, the woman must have thought.

“I don’t think so.” She wrapped her woollen shawl more tightly round her and frowned as if struggling to remember. “There was a lady, I think. And a couple of young men.”

“Do you remember what they looked like?”

“Just young men, you know the type: leather jackets and jeans…”

An absurd idea flitted across Julia’s mind. The limits of the impossible had, after all, broadened considerably in the last few days.

“Did you see someone in a navy blue jacket? A man about thirty with his hair in a ponytail?”

The seller did not remember having seen Max. She’d noticed the woman, though, because she’d stopped for a moment as if she were going to buy something. She was blonde, middle-aged and well-dressed. But she couldn’t imagine her breaking into a car; she wasn’t the type. She was wearing a raincoat.

“And dark glasses?”

“Yes.”

Cesar looked at Julia gravely.

“It’s not even sunny today,” he said.

“I know.”

“It could have been the same woman who delivered the documents.” Cesar paused and his eyes hardened. “Or Menchu.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Cesar shook his head, glancing at the people walking past.

“No, you’re right. But you yourself thought it might be Max.”

“Max… is different.” Her face darkened as she looked down the street, as though Max or the blonde in the raincoat might still be around. What she saw froze the words on her lips and shook her with the force of a blow. There was no woman answering the description, but amongst the awnings and the plastic sheeting of the stalls was a car, parked near the corner. A blue car.

From where she was standing, Julia couldn’t tell if it was a Ford or not, but the jolt of emotion she felt propelled her into action. To Cesar’s surprise, she left the seller of religious images, walked a little way along the pavement and then, skirting a couple of stalls, stood staring over at the corner, on tiptoe in order to get a better look. It was a blue Ford, with smoked-glass windows. Thoughts crowded into her head. She couldn’t see the numberplate, but there had been too many coincidences that morning: Max, Menchu, the card on the windscreen, the empty spray can, the woman in the raincoat and now the car that had become a key element in her nightmare. She was conscious that her hands were trembling and she thrust them into her pockets at the same moment she felt Cesar’s presence behind her.

“It’s the car, Cesar. Do you know what that means? Whoever it is, is inside.”

Cesar didn’t say anything. He slowly took off his hat, perhaps thinking it inappropriate for whatever might happen next, and looked at Julia. She had never loved him so much as she did then, his lips pressed together, his chin up, his blue eyes narrowed and in them a rare glint of steel. The thin lines of his meticulously shaven face looked tense; his jaw muscles twitched. His eyes seemed to say that, man of impeccable manners with little inclination for violence he might be, but he was no coward. At least not where his princess was concerned.

“Wait for me here,” he said.

“No. Let’s go together. You and me.” She looked at him tenderly. Once, when she was a child, she’d kissed him playfully on the mouth. At that moment she felt an impulse to do so again; but this wasn’t a game they were playing now.

She put her hand in her bag and cocked the derringer. Very calmly, Cesar put his umbrella under his arm, went over to one of the stalls and, as if he were selecting a walking stick, grabbed a huge iron poker.

“May I?” he said, pressing the first note he found in his wallet into the astonished stallholder’s hand. He then looked serenely at Julia again and said: “Just this once, my dear, allow me to go first.”

They set off towards the car, using stalls as cover. Julia’s heart was beating hard when she at last got a glimpse of the numberplate. There was no doubt about it: a blue Ford, smoked-glass windows and the letters TH. Her mouth was dry, and she had an uncomfortable feeling in her stomach as if it had contracted in upon itself. That, she said to herself quickly, was what Captain Peter Blood used to feel before boarding an enemy ship.

They reached the corner, and everything happened fast. Someone inside the car lowered the driver’s window to toss out a cigarette. Cesar dropped his umbrella and his hat, raised the poker and walked round to the left side of the car, prepared, if necessary, to kill the pirates or whoever was inside. Julia, her teeth gritted and the blood pounding in her temples, started to run. She took the pistol out and stuck it through the window before the driver had time to wind it up again. In front of her pistol appeared an unknown face: a young man with a beard, who was staring at the gun with terrified eyes. The man in the passenger seat jumped when Cesar wrenched opened the door, the iron poker raised threateningly above his head.

“Get out! Out!” shouted Julia, almost beside herself.

His face deathly pale, the man with the beard raised his hands with his fingers wide, in a gesture of supplication.

“Calm down, Senorita!” he stammered. “For God’s sake, calm down! We’re the police.”

“I recognise,” said Inspector Feijoo, clasping his hands together on his office desk, “that so far we haven’t been terribly efficient in this matter…”

He smiled placidly at Cesar, as if the police’s lack of efficiency was justified. Since we’re in sophisticated company, his look seemed to say, we can allow ourselves a certain amount of constructive self-criticism.

But Cesar seemed ill-disposed to accept this.

“That,” he said disdainfully, “is one way of describing what others would call sheer incompetence.”

It was clear from Feijoo’s crumbling smile that Cesar’s remark was the last straw. His teeth appeared beneath the thick moustache, biting his lower lip and he began an impatient drumming on the desk with the end of his cheap ballpoint. Cesar’s presence meant that he had no option but to tread carefully, and all three of them knew why.

“The police have their methods.”

These were empty words, and Cesar grew impatient, cruel. The fact that he had dealings with Feijoo didn’t mean that he had to be nice to him, still less when he’d caught him in some funny business.

“If those methods consist of having Julia followed while some madman out there is on the loose, sending anonymous messages, I would rather not say what I think of such methods.” He turned towards Julia, then back to the policeman. “I can’t believe that you consider her to be a suspect in the death of Professor Ortega. Why haven’t you investigated me?”

“We have.” Feijoo was piqued by Cesar’s impertinence, and had to bite back his anger. “The fact is, we investigated everyone.” He turned up his palms, accepting responsibility for what he was prepared to acknowledge had been a monumental blunder. “Unfortunately, these things do happen in this job.”

“And have you found out anything?”

“I’m afraid not.” Feijoo reached inside his jacket to scratch an armpit and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “To be perfectly honest, we’re back at square one. The pathologists can’t agree on the cause of Alvaro Ortega’s death. If there really is a murderer at large, our only hope is that at some point he makes a mistake.”

“Is that why you’ve been following me?” asked Julia, still furious. She was clutching her bag in her lap. “To see if I make a mistake?”

The Inspector looked at her grimly.

“You shouldn’t take it so personally. It’s purely routine. Just police tactics.”

Cesar arched an eyebrow.

“As a tactic it doesn’t strike me as being either particularly promising or particularly efficient.”

Feijoo gulped down the sarcasm. At that moment, thought Julia with wicked delight, he must be deeply regretting any illicit dealings he’d had with Cesar. All it needed was for Cesar to open his mouth in a few opportune places and, with no direct accusations being made and with no official paperwork involved, in the discreet way that things tend to be done at a certain level, the Inspector would find himself ending his career in a gloomy office in some far-flung police department, as a pen-pusher with no prospect of extra income.

“I can only assure you,” he said at last, when he’d managed to digest some of the rancour which, as his face plainly revealed, was still stuck in his gullet, “that we will continue our investigations.” He
seemed
to remember something, reluctantly. “And of course the young lady will be put under special protection.”

“Don’t bother,” said Julia. Feijoo’s humiliation was not enough to make her forget her own. “No more blue cars, please. Enough is enough.”

“It’s for your own safety, Senorita.”

“As you see, I can look after myself.”

The policeman looked away. No doubt his throat still hurt from the bawling out he’d given the two policemen for letting themselves be surprised. “Idiots!” he’d screamed at them. “Bloody amateurs! You’ve really dropped me in the shit this time and, believe me, you’re going to suffer for it!” Cesar and Julia had heard it all while they were waiting in the corridor at the police station.

“As for that…” he began now, after waging what had obviously been a hard battle in his mind between duty and convenience, and crumbling before the weightier demands of the latter. “Given the circumstances, I don’t think that… I mean that the pistol…” He swallowed again before looking at Cesar. “After all, it is an antique, not a modern weapon in the real sense of the word. And you, as an antiques dealer, have the correct licence.” He looked down at the desk, doubtless remembering the last piece, an eighteenth-century clock, for which, only weeks before, Cesar had paid him a good price. “For my part, and I’m speaking here for my two men involved as well…” Again he gave that treacherous, conciliatory smile. “I mean that we’re prepared to overlook certain details of the matter. You, Don Cesar, may reclaim your derringer as long as you promise to take better care of it in future. As for you, Senorita, keep us informed of any new developments and, of course, phone us at once if you have any problems. As far as we’re concerned, there never was any gun. Do I make myself clear?”