Death in the Sun (12 page)

Staffe blinks and his eyelids scratch the lens of his eyes. When he squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them again, rings of yellow project onto what he thinks must be a blindfold.

He smells cologne, says, ‘Quesada? Quesada, is it you?’

There is no reply and he pushes himself up so he is sitting and shuffles back, feeling what might be a wall against his shoulders, then his back. It is cold and he feels his bare chest with his hand. He hears water running and then his breath is taken completely away as the water is thrown onto him. ‘Bastards!’ he shouts, then a slap across his face and a woman shouting, ‘Shut up!’ She has a husk to her voice and he thinks it might be familiar.

‘Pepa?’ he says, quietly. ‘Is it you?’

The woman laughs, says nothing but someone takes a hold of his hair. A profound, dull weight presses on his chest. He twists and they pull him flat to the floor, holding his legs, then an excruciating pain to his heart.

He shouts, can’t stop himself, and realises they have something pressed to the thin scar tissue that is taut and fresh over his wound. They press harder and he bites back on the scream.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ says the woman.

‘What did you find?’ says a man. He can’t place the voice.

They press his scar tissue harder until he can’t bear it. He struggles to breathe, thinks he is going to faint, then loud in his ear, ‘You let this lie, Guilli. We
know
you.’

And he passes out.

*

He can see. A patch of sky above is brilliantly blue and he can smell ozone. He is swelteringly hot and his chest is sticky. He blinks his eyes and forces himself up, sees that he is nude save his boxer shorts. His chest is brown and flaking with dried blood. ‘Bastards,’ he says, flinching, seeing that his wound is weeping. Looking around, he is surrounded by the plastic of a large, dilapidated greenhouse. Beside him, a hole has been dug in the ground – big enough to fit a kneeling man.

Staffe senses someone is present and he looks around. There is an opening in the plastic that gives onto the scrubland sloping down to the dirty beach. Between him and the opening is the African in his
burnous
. It is blue and yellow and he is black and blue. One of his eyes is swollen. He is shaking and his nose is askew.

He remembers what the two Moroccans had said about this man: that nothing could hurt him. Staffe stands, staggers across to the man in the
burnous
, says, ‘Who was it?’

The African shakes his head.

Staffe moves closer to the African, but from behind him, the tall Moroccan in the Bulls vest shouts, ‘Stay away from him.’ He strides across to Staffe, a machete hanging by his leg. He takes hold of Staffe and pulls him away. The sun glints off a ruby stud in the youth’s ear.

In his home, made from pallets and corrugated sheets, the Bulls youth gives Staffe a pair of torn, purple flannel track-suit bottoms. Staffe’s mind spins to the phone call he had from his sister. Her number would be the last call in his phone. His device surely in the hands of people who had practically plucked at his heart. ‘I need a phone. Do you have a phone?’ he says to the Bulls youth.

‘I don’t have much credit.’

‘Just one call. Please.’

The Bulls youth shakes his head.

Staffe forces a look of
c’est la vie
, thanks the Bulls youth for the trousers, and holds out his hand. The Bulls youth takes it and they shake, his machete still hanging loose and Staffe sees a glimmer of humanity in this man’s eyes and clinches that moment, biting his lip against the pain and with the three middle fingers of his free hand, he jabs the Bulls youth in the throat, thrusts his knee into the balls, just missing the blade of the machete, hearing it fall, watching the Bulls youth bend double. He puts a foot on his throat, reaches down, puts his hand into the youth’s pocket, and says, ‘Sorry. I really am sorry. I will compensate you.’

He takes the man’s wallet and phone and machete, then ties him to the iron stove that has been made from old truck wheels welded together. Staffe says, ‘Really, I’m sorry, but I have no choice. Really, I don’t.’

Then he thinks of Marie, up in the mountains with another body.

*

Pepa grimaces as she dabs the iodine-soaked lint into Staffe’s reopened wound. His bottom lip is white from the continued biting. He gasps, looks as if he might faint again, and she says, ‘I think it’s clean, but we need to get you to the hospital.’

Staffe looks at the phone he took from the Bulls youth. He feels a stab of guilt, then a slow wave of fear. Marie still hasn’t responded to his calls and texts. He says to Pepa, ‘Where were you today?’

‘Who are you calling?’ she says, folding the lint so she has a clean corner, pouring more iodine.

‘They won’t answer.’ He waits for her to look up. ‘Like you.’

‘I told you before. I was with the young policeman.’

‘And what did he have for you?’

‘Something is wrong.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know. Something to do with the police report. He won’t show it me, but I’m sure he has a copy.’

‘You have good relations with the police.’

‘It’s a thin line. They are cautious of me – you must know that.’

‘I know a journalist can be a friend as well as an enemy. So, is there anything you haven’t told me?’

‘No!’

Staffe takes her hand. ‘How would they have known I was at Raúl’s?’

Pepa pulls her hand away and gives the lint to Staffe. She goes to her wardrobe and picks out the biggest blouse she has, throws it to him. ‘I don’t like what you’re implying.’

‘She sounded like you.’

‘Who sounded like me?’

Staffe tries to weigh Pepa up. Today, she looks different: her hair is tied back; tight, three-quarter jeans; a crisp, white T-shirt and no make-up; a sheen on her neck and shoulders from the relentless heat. He thinks that here and now, she appears to be too young, too demure, to do what he fears she is capable of. He says, ‘There was a woman.’

‘Ask Jesús where I was.’

‘How long were you with him?’

‘You’re a cocksucker.’

‘I only said there was a woman.’

‘You said she sounded like me. What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I’ll go.’ He puts on the shirt.

Pepa laughs.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘You look like someone from the fair.’ She opens the door to her wardrobe and his image angles back towards him – his purple track-suit bottoms and Pepa’s lemon shirt with the buttons popping; white flip-flops and two days stubble, bruising to his eyes. ‘A proper
chorizo
.’ She puts a hand on his forearm. ‘Let me take you to the hospital.’

‘I have to go back to Almagen.’

‘Why?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘Is that what the phone calls are about?’

‘They’re personal.’

‘I’ll take you.’

‘Don’t you have work to do?’

‘I’m doing it. My chief will blame me if anything happens to blacken Raúl’s name. I have to stay on top of this.’

‘Cover it up, you mean.’

Pepa lets his comment slide, shakes her hair loose and tilts her head, brushing hard without the slightest grimace. ‘The English papers want the Barrington story. I can tie it into the demolitions, too. It will be a nice syndication fee for
La Lente.
As you know, they have a piece of me.’

Staffe sits on the bed. He wants to sleep. The prospect of having to get a bus back up to the mountains, jostling with stinking men drinking rough wine and chomping on
bocadillos de jamón
doesn’t appeal.

‘I’ll pack,’ says Pepa, tossing her hairbrush onto the bed. ‘Feel free to use it,’ she smiles, going into her bathroom.

The cliché about enemies being kept close strikes him, so he calls through to the bathroom, ‘When I get back, I need to be alone. For a few hours.’

‘I can amuse myself.’ She pops her head out. ‘And in the morning, we’ll get you to the local medico.’

He puts his hand to his heart and remembers Jadus Golding. Sometimes, you trust people and it cuts you. But if you can’t trust anyone – what becomes of the world, and us in it? ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘And thank you.’

She looks at him with wide, sad eyes.

Staffe leans back, wonders if things can ever be the same, since Jadus Golding unloaded two bullets into his body. He closes his eyes, pictures his office in Leadengate, and Pulford and Pennington, Josie too. He’s not sure he can remember what she looks like: her nose, the line of her jaw, the fall of her hair, and the sound of her voice. But you can’t take people apart like that.

The pictures fade to nothing. Next thing he knows, he jolts in his sleep and then Pepa is tapping him gently on the shoulder. He says, ‘Josie?’ feels something in his heart.

Pepa says, with a husk in her voice, ‘Who’s Josie?’

Staffe rubs his eyes.

‘Let’s go,’ she says in a low, foreign tongue.

*

As Staffe rounds the track below the Los Alamos woods, he loses sight of Marie’s
cortijo
. His new phone vibrates and he opens it up, sees it is a text from Marie.

dont go 2 house + dont call me. Keep left + low + come 2 wood on yr left. U will b watchd.

He wants to call her, ask if she is all right and has anybody been to see her, but he does as he is told, his heart racing, and when he gets into the shade of the wood, he leans against a tree and wipes his sodden brow, lets his eyes adjust to the dark of the canopy.

Staffe hears a whistle and tries to locate it. He hears it again and peers at where he thinks it is coming from. Something moves and he walks slowly, wary of where he treads. Soon, about fifty metres away, he discerns the shape of his sister. He stops dead. She is crouching.

He moves higher, trying to glean whether she is on her own or whether she has company, but in his anxiety he takes his eye off the ground, steps on a dead branch and it cracks, high and loud, and he ducks, instinctively, squats in the parched undergrowth. Marie stands and he holds his breath. She raises an arm and he waits to see if anyone else shows their hand. She takes a step forward, coming towards him and he goes to meet her, not caring now if it is a trap. What else can he do?

‘Are you alone?’ he says.

‘Kind of.’

‘What do you mean?’

Marie steps right up to him, puts her head to his chest, which makes him wince but he swallows the pain as she begins to talk, her voice vibrating against his wound. ‘I don’t know why I thought something good could happen to me. Such an idiot, chasing this bloody stupid dream. That’s all it is – a pipe dream.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘I told you there was a body. It’s buried in the earth, like he was standing up.’

‘My God.’

Marie pulls away. ‘What happened to you, Will?’ She places a finger to his bruised face. ‘Who did this to you?’

‘A stupid fight.’

She regards him intently, notices the petal of blood on his fresh shirt. ‘And what’s this?’ She puts a hand on his heart.

A pinch of pain utters, like a semitone. ‘Does Paolo know about the body?’

She nods.

‘He told you about it?’

Marie shakes her head, her lip trembling. ‘No, I saw him looking at it but he said nothing to me about it. What’s become of us, Will?’

‘Is he at the house?’

She shakes her head again, on the verge of tears. ‘I think he might be with Jackson. The police are watching the house. I saw them.’

‘Is it Quesada?’

‘I don’t know. I told you, I heard someone out here the other night. What will you do, Will?’

‘Show me the body.’

Marie leads the way and watches as her brother picks at the soil around the bones. He does it for the best part of an hour, with just one finger and when he is done, he sits opposite the skeleton, just looking at it. The look on his face is familiar to Marie. A look from the past, another country.

Eventually, Staffe takes his stolen phone out of his pocket, comes to her and she says, ‘You’re feeling the rush, aren’t you?’

‘Rush?’

‘You get off on this. That rush of the chase – but it could be us being chased.’

‘That’s why we have to take control,’ he says, calling Professor Peralta. He tells him what they have found and that he hasn’t told the Guardia Civil, but it’s only a matter of time before they know.

‘We must preserve the authenticity of the site. I have friends in the Cuerpo Nacional here in Granada. I’ll be there in the morning. And I’ll have company.’

When Staffe hangs up, he is unsure as to whether he has taken a step towards the truth or – holding Marie’s hand as they go slowly in the deepening dusk to the
cortijo –
not.