A Death in Valencia by Jason Webster

Author:Jason Webster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-09-15T16:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

Lucía Bautista lived in a traditional El Cabanyal house on the Calle Barraca, not far from the port. The facade was tiled in blue-and-white check, with vegetal motifs over the entrance. The large wooden door had a smaller door inside which opened into the house itself. Cámara peeped through the glass, shading his eyes from the glare of the sun, trying to see if anyone was in, before lifting the Hand-of-Fátima door knocker and banging it a couple of times against the metal panel.

From the reflection in the glass he was aware that an elderly woman was watching him from the opposite side of the road. She was sprinkling the pavement outside her front door with water to draw cooler air into the haze of her home, glancing up at him as he waited to see if anyone answered his call.

‘Que no está,’ she shouted over after a couple of minutes had passed with no sign of life inside. She’s out.

Cámara turned and crossed the road to talk to her, lifting his badge for her to see.

‘Policía!’ The woman dropped her eyes and shrugged. It was a common reaction among some elderly people–an instinct to have as little as possible to do with law enforcers, instilled over centuries of State and Church repression.

‘Do you know where I can find her?’

‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘She goes out sometimes. Walking.’

‘Do you know how long ago?’

The woman was sprinkling the last of her water as quickly as possible on to the ground, looking for an excuse to head back inside.

‘Maybe five minutes ago.’ And she waved her hand in the direction of the port, as though to indicate the way in which Lucía had gone.

Cámara thanked her and set off in the same direction. It felt good to be back in this part of the city; the area had a village-like feel to it, a proper neighbourhood, and the traditional design of the houses gave it an elegance and sense of history that was hard to find in all parts of Valencia. More reason, he thought, for the Town Hall to want to pull swathes of it down. Like tyrannical rulers of the ancient world, the authorities had a crazed need to destroy anything that had been made before their rule, setting the clock to zero in order to remake the city in their own, shining, modern, reinforced-concrete image.

He smiled. These were political thoughts coursing through his mind. Not something he was accustomed to in himself. Hilario would be proud.

He looked up: above the line of the roofs stood a tower, perhaps another four or five metres higher. A torre-miramar it was called: one of the towers from which fishermen’s families had used to attach lights to help guide the boats back to the beach; a place from which one could see the sea over the heads of the neighbouring houses. There were fewer and fewer of them left now: already a couple had been pulled down by order of the Town Hall.

He emerged from the shade of the street and out into the open space of a square near the port.

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