That took care of the chattering classes, I’m happy to say. I was forgotten as the Mass progressed. It didn’t seem to last as long as the previous one had. . Father Olivares was acting alone; that may have accounted for it. . before we were making our way outside, into the square with the vast palm tree, full of noisy birds, in the centre. I would have left straight away, but Justine came across to me. She’d been talking to the two older men, but detached herself. One of them, the taller of the two, moved on to talk to Angel, but the other followed her with his eyes, until they settled on me. ‘My uncles,’ she explained. ‘My parents’ brothers. What have you heard?’ she asked me quietly.
‘Nothing that I believe,’ I told her. ‘I’m going to Girona this afternoon to see the new head honcho. He wants to interview me.’ I stopped, and reminded myself that I was talking to a woman who’d just lost her mother in terrible circumstances. ‘But how are you? I haven’t had a chance to tell you how sorry I am.’
‘I’m as shocked and disbelieving as everyone else in this town,’ she replied. ‘The man you’re going to see, he visited me last night. Primavera, I’m like you. There are things I find it almost impossible to accept. When Gomez told me you were a suspect, I laughed at him. I was ready to laugh at the man Valdes too, but after he’d spoken to me. . I still find it hard to conceive of such a thing, but. . You go see him; maybe you’ll spot a flaw in his argument. My God, I hope you do.’
I followed the cortège to the cemetery on the edge of town. They bury their dead differently in Spain, not in the ground as a rule. . for much of the year you’d need to use explosives to dig a grave. . but in a space in a wall, a vertical mausoleum, which is then sealed. I watched Justine’s mother’s sad little box being slid into hers, then slid off quietly myself and headed for Girona. I’d looked up the address of the Mossos headquarters. It’s in a street called Vista Alegre, near the river that flows through the city. I didn’t know it, but my satnav took me straight there.
Commissioner Valdes was ready for me, in a utilitarian office with one-way windows and cream-painted walls, a tall slim man with a high forehead and black hair that was cut fairly long. He reminded me very much of John Cazale, the actor who played Fredo Corleone in The Godfather series. I suspected that he’d adopted the hairstyle after seeing the movies. I wondered whether he’d made a special trip, or whether he always worked Saturdays. That was unlikely, I decided, for someone of his rank; I didn’t know whether to be flattered, or worried. ‘What do you want to discuss?’ I asked him, bluntly.
‘Why did you run after you found Dolores Fumado’s body?’ he retorted, as if to show he was better at bluntness than I was.
‘Because I was scared. I’d had a tip that my DNA had been found on the murder weapon; when I found Dolores dead in my wood store I flipped.’
‘Who told you that you should go?’
‘In those circumstances, do you think I needed telling? If it had happened to you, Commissioner, you’d have been out of there like Speedy Gonzalez.’
A gleam in Valdes’ eyes suggested that he might not have liked being compared to the fastest mouse in all Mayheeco, but he let it pass. ‘One never knows how one will react until such a thing happens,’ he conceded. ‘And in your case, Senora Blackstone, you may as well have vanished into a mouse hole. For there was no trace of you to be found when Intendant Gomez put out a call for your apprehension and arrest. You must have had help; there’s no question. Nor is there any question in my mind that the person who helped you was Father Hernanz.’
I shrugged. ‘What makes you think that?’ I asked, casually.
‘I’m helped by the fact that we found your passport, your credit cards and a bicycle, later identified by Inspector Guinart as yours, in a garage in L’Escala, rented by Father Hernanz. We searched it on Thursday evening, before his arrest. Now why would he have those?’
‘Maybe I left them at his residence,’ I suggested, ‘and asked him to keep them for me.’
Valdes laughed. ‘When you started to run, I can’t see you dropping anything off. He made you leave them behind when he sent you off, with your dyed hair. No point in changing colour if you were carrying documents that identified you.’ I didn’t see any point in commenting on that, since he’d got it dead right. ‘Do you know what I thought when I found those things, senora?’ He picked up an envelope and tossed it across the desk. ‘They’re all in there, by the way. You can have them back.’
I picked it up. ‘Thank you. No, what did you think?’
‘I thought you were dead, I honestly did. I thought that your friend the priest had killed you too, and that we’d find charred remains of you in the boiler below the church. I thought I was going to have to tell your little boy that his mother was gone. I was afraid, senora; afraid I was going to have to do that.’ Valdes frowned, and I saw that he was serious. ‘Even when I went to arrest him, I thought that was the case. It was only later that morning when I asked Guinart to identify your bike that he told me, no, that you had come back. Do you still want to deny that he helped you?’
‘I’ll choose to say nothing, if that’s all right with you.’
‘Fine, for it doesn’t matter to us. It should matter to you, though, for it was all part of the set-up.’ He stood up. ‘Before we go any further,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to come with me. There’s someone I’d like you to talk to.’
For a moment I thought he was going to take me to see Gerard, down in the cells or wherever they were keeping him, but all he did was lead me into the room next door. It was bigger than his, with several desks; most of them empty, but one, near a window, was occupied by a man in civilian clothes. Even seated he looked big, and when he turned towards me, he looked ugly as well, a touch of Frankenstein’s monster in his thick gnarled eyebrows.
‘Let me introduce you,’ said Valdes. ‘Senora Blackstone, meet Captain Jorge Lavorante, of the Granada city police. He’s a contemporary of Gerard Hernanz; they were at school together, in fact. He has a story that I believe you have to hear.’
I had a terrible feeling that I knew what it was, but I held on to my poker face as I took the seat that the commissioner offered.
Lavorante’s voice turned out to be as soft as he was hard, with an attractive Andalusian lisp. ‘A long time ago, back in the city,’ he began, ‘I was a new kid on the force, when we got a call. It was from a house up on Cuesta de los Cabras, where the Hernanz family lived, from one of their neighbours, scared. She said that someone was being killed up there. I got sent to the scene by my sergeant, on my own. On my own, lady, d’ you hear that? Why? Because Gerard Hernanz and his old man were involved, and none of my brave colleagues wanted any part of them. Plus they knew I knew Gerard, and that if anyone could calm things down, I could.’
‘You make him sound like a monster.’
Lavorante shook his head. ‘I make him sound like the toughest man in Granada, for that’s what he was. You know he was a pub bouncer when he was a kid, after he got out of the marines?’
I nodded, defiantly.
The big cop ignored me. ‘Nobody fucked with him, apart from one time. I got the story afterwards, from the other doorman. There was one guy wouldn’t take a telling. He was rude and abusive. Gerard’s girl was there at the time, and the idiot called her a whore. He was still semi-conscious when they got him to hospital, yet Gerard only hit him once. He was a gypsy, and later three of his family came to the bar looking for revenge, the knife-carrying kind. Like I say, Gerard had been in the marines by then, and he had learned all sorts of close-combat skills. He took the blade off the biggest of them so fast he didn’t even see it, put him in an armlock, and held it to this throat. Then he told them very quietly that their brother had been way out of order, and that it would be a pity if someone had to die because of a stupid little shit like him. “Put like that,” one of the gypsies said, “we can’t argue.” They all shook hands with him and went off into the night.’