The Gilded Seal

‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot! It’s me, Sergeant Gillez. He’s upstairs. Someone get me a doctor. The bastard’s broken my nose. I tried to stop him, but he had a gun. Shoot him. Oh, my nose. Somebody shoot him, for God’s sake!’

Despite everything, Tom smiled. Cops like Gillez gave most criminals a good name.

THIRTEEN (#ulink_72f9b718-76cd-53d0-b35c-4ef7b335e140)

South Street, New York

19th April – 3.17 p.m.

The sound of sirens echoing down Broadway’s steel canyon reached Jennifer several blocks before she turned on to South Street and saw the reflection of the blue strobe lights in the glass walls looming around her. New York was one of the few cities where sound travelled faster than light.

As she drew closer, she could see that a small crowd had gathered at the foot of the one of the buildings, straining to see what was going on from behind a hastily erected set of weathered blue police barriers. As she watched, the crowd parted reluctantly to let two paramedic teams through, before snapping shut hungrily behind them.

‘Stop here,’ she instructed her driver, who tacked obediently right and eased to a halt about fifty yards from the building’s entrance.

Jennifer stepped out. A local news channel was already broadcasting from across the street, presumably tipped off by one of the cops that they kept on the payroll for just this sort of eventuality. And given the manpower that the NYPD was already lavishing on the scene, the networks wouldn’t be far behind.

‘What’s going on?’ she demanded, grabbing the arm of a passing officer and flashing her badge. He glanced at it suspiciously, checking her face against the photo.

‘Homicide. Some hot-shot attorney.’ He shrugged disinterestedly, giving Jennifer the impression that either this was a fairly routine occurrence in this part of Manhattan, or that a small part of him felt that one less attorney in the world was probably no bad thing.

‘He got a name?’

‘Yeah, Hammon. At least that’s what it sounded like. Half the time you can’t hear a goddamned thing on this piece of shit –’ He smacked his radio resentfully. ‘Now, if you don’t mind…?’

Jennifer waved him on and took a deep breath. Hammon dead. Coincidence? Possibly. Probably. Until she knew more, it was pointless to speculate.

‘Special Agent Browne?’

A questioning, almost incredulous voice broke into her thoughts. As she turned, a man in his mid-fifties broke away from the crowd at the base of the building and walked towards her, his rolling gait suggesting some sort of longstanding hip injury. Every part of him appeared to be sagging, his clothes hanging listlessly from his sharp, bony frame, the excess skin under his eyes and chin draped like folds of loose material. Brushing his straw-coloured hair across his balding scalp, he smiled warmly as he approached, the colour of his teeth betraying that he was a smoker, and a heavy one at that.

Jennifer frowned, unable to place the man’s chalky face and pallid green eyes, her mind feverishly trawling back through distant high school memories and her freshman year at Columbia. Now she was closer, she noticed that he had a mustard stain on the right leg of his faded chinos and a button missing from the front of his blue linen jacket.

‘Leigh Lewis – American Voice.’ He held out a moist palm, which Jennifer shook warily, still uncertain who he was. ‘Here, Tony, get a shot.’

Before Jennifer knew what was happening, a flashgun exploded in her face. The fog lifted. Lewis. The journalist Green had warned her about.

‘So, what’s the deal here? You know the vic?’ Lewis jerked his head at the building behind him, a tape recorder materialising under her nose.

‘No comment,’ Jennifer insisted as she pushed past him, her annoyance with herself at not having immediately recognised his name only slightly tempered by her curiosity at what he was doing here.

‘Was Hammon under federal investigation?’ Lewis skipped backwards to keep up with her.

‘No comment,’ Jennifer repeated, shielding her face from the camera’s cyclopic gaze as she marched purposefully towards the building’s entrance.

‘Or had you two hooked up? The word is you like to party.’

‘Get out of my way,’ Jennifer said through gritted teeth. She was only a few feet from the security cordon now and she gripped her ID anxiously in anticipation of escaping Lewis before she lost her temper.

‘The only catch, of course, is that everyone who screws you winds up dead.’ Lewis was standing directly in front of her now, blocking her way and moving his head in line with hers every time she tried to look past him. ‘In fact, maybe I should call you the black widow, Agent Browne.’

‘Fuck you.’ Jennifer pushed Lewis roughly in the chest. He stumbled backwards, tripping over his photographer and sending him sprawling.

She caught the shocked yet triumphant expression on Lewis’s face as she stalked past them, the camera still chattering noisily as the photographer continued to shoot. She flashed her badge at the bemused officer controlling access into the building and stalked inside, her eyes brimming with tears of silent anger. From behind her she could hear Lewis’s voice ringing out in an annoyingly sing-song tone.

‘Can I quote you on that?’

FOURTEEN (#ulink_73588720-39f8-54bb-8e7f-7c48129b9aa2)

Las Candelarias, Seville

19th April – 9.23 p.m.

Tom had waited for the protective cloak of darkness to fall before venturing over to this side of town. Although Gillez and his colleagues were reassuringly incompetent, there was certainly no point in tempting fate by walking around in broad daylight. The trail left by Rafael’s killer was cold enough already, without Tom being arrested and delayed by yet another round of pointless questioning.

He had therefore spent the intervening hours holed up in the tenebrous anonymity of a small basement bar in the Barrio Santa Cruz, trying to forget what he had felt upon seeing the place where Rafael had died, and focus instead on what he had learned there.

On reflection, of all the things that Gillez had told him, two stood out. The first was that Rafael had been seen going to confession at the Basilica de la Macarena which, given Rafael’s attitude towards religion in general and the Catholic faith in particular, seemed about as likely as the Pope being spotted in a strip bar.

The second was that although Gillez had mentioned Rafael’s apartment being searched, he’d said nothing about his studio. It was just possible, therefore, that the police didn’t know about it. This was hardly surprising given that, as far as Tom could remember, the property was registered in the name of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, a once-famous Sevillian bullfighter and longstanding resident of the Cementerio de San Fernando.

The crumbling street of tattered warehouses and tumble-down workshops was deserted, but Tom stuck to the shadows all the same. When he was satisfied that he was alone, he crossed over, side-stepping a decomposing car raised on bricks. The wreck had been set alight at some point and the seats were melted back to their frames, scraps of fabric and foam clinging stubbornly to their blackened skeletons like skin.

There were no lights on inside Rafael’s two-storey building, and as he drew closer Tom could see that the padlock securing its heavily graffitied roller-shutter to the ground was still intact. Above him, a small fern that had somehow taken root under the flaking plaster swayed lazily in the sticky heat.

Checking around him one last time, he sprang the lock, raised the shutter high enough to slip under it and then rolled it back behind him. The noise reverberated along the length of the windowless room that stretched in front of him like a deep coffin. Grabbing a chair, he leaned it against the shutter and then balanced the padlock he’d removed from the door on its seat. It was an old trick, but an effective one.

Locating the torch in its usual hiding place, Tom crept along the narrow corridor formed by the assortment of unwanted furniture, old tyres and children’s toys that had been piled up on either side of the room, dolls’ eyes glinting accusingly every so often out of the darkness. A few of the nicer pieces had been covered in protective sheets; as Tom walked past, they lifted slowly as if reaching out to touch him, before settling back with an inaudible sigh.

Compared to the ground floor, the upstairs room was light and airy, with large windows front and back and a high, glazed roof. There was a full moon, its anaemic glow chased away every few seconds by the red-blooded pulse of a large neon advertising sign high on the wall of a neighbouring building.

Despite the shifting light, Tom could see that the room was every bit as chaotic as he remembered. The concrete floor, for example, was almost lost under a layer of dried paint, thin veins of random colours that crackled underfoot like dry twigs on a forest floor. Discarded sketches and half-finished canvases were gathered in the corners as if blown there by the wind, empty paint tubes and worn brushes emerging from the gaps between them like the masts of a ship half-buried in sand.

And yet not everything was the same. A chair had been flipped over on to its front, its legs extended helplessly into the air, its innards spilling through the deep gash that had been cut in its seat. Two easels were lying prostate on the ground. All the cupboards and drawers had been yanked open and their contents scooped out on to the floor beneath. Tom’s face set into a grim frown. Whoever had turned over Rafael’s apartment had clearly been here too.

Kneeling down, he plucked a small photo frame from where it was sheltering under a crumpled newspaper. Although the glass had been shattered, he recognised Rafael’s grinning face through the sparkling web of tiny fractures. He had his arm around Tom on one side and Eva on the other, and the three of them were sitting on the edge of a fountain in the Alcázar. The mixture of anger and disbelief that he had felt on seeing the crime-scene photographs welled up in him again. Why?

There was a thud downstairs. Steel on concrete. The padlock falling off the chair he’d left leaning against the shutter. Someone had come in behind him.

He placed the frame back on the ground and crept over to the top of the stairs, positioning himself out of sight to the left of the doorway. From below he heard the sound of careful footsteps and then the tell-tale creak of the staircase. The third step, he remembered from when he had made his own way up.

He readied himself, ready to send whoever was coming up sprawling across the room, when the faint scent of perfume reached him. A perfume he recognised.

‘Tom?’ An uncertain voice filtered through the open doorway.

‘Eva?’ Tom edged forward, his shadow further obscuring the already dark stairwell. A figure advanced towards him.

‘Still using that old chair routine?’ A flash of white teeth amid the gloom.