‘An accident, then,’ Ben said.
‘You think I haven’t thought about that? Okay, let’s say she accidentally drove to the edge of the cliff and then accidentally forgot to stop, and the car went over. Same story. There’s the car, but where’s she?’
Ben could have told him there were a hundred ways for a corpse to vanish at sea. The tides could draw it miles out, where it would eventually sink to the bottom before the bacteria inside the gut and chest cavity would start to produce enough methane, hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide to float it back up to the surface. That process could take days, during which time the cadaver would become an ever more appetising meal to the numerous species of shark and other carnivorous fish that frequented those waters. Such details were best left unmentioned under the circumstances, so he kept his mouth shut.
‘I mean,’ Raul went on, ‘it’s been nearly three months. A body would surely have turned up by now.’
Ben looked at him, surprised. ‘Three months? I thought this must have only just happened.’
Raul sank back deep into the cushions of the sofa, as if suddenly deflated. ‘It was July sixteenth. Eighty-three days ago. A place called Rügen Island. She apparently drove for hours to get there from her home in Munich. She …’ He closed his eyes for a moment, as if it was too painful to say more. ‘The German police closed the case not long afterwards. There was all kinds of bureaucratic bullshit. My parents, they flew out there. Neither of them had ever been on a plane before. Never even left Valdepeñas de Jaén until then.’
‘Did you go with them?’
Raul shook his head sadly. ‘Couldn’t bring myself to go. I felt like a dog about it then and I still do. I just couldn’t deal with it. Had to let them go alone. They were there for five days. My father, he looked like a little old man when they got back, with nothing to show but a wad of police reports. Three more weeks went by, still no body. Can’t have a funeral without a body, right? So they had a service for her at the church in Valdepeñas de Jaén. Now they won’t even speak to me, because I wouldn’t attend it. They think it’s like I don’t care. Like I cut myself away from the whole thing, and from them.’
‘They might have needed your support at a time like that,’ Ben said.
Raul turned the red-rimmed eyes back on Ben. ‘Yes, and that’s something else for me to feel like shit about, isn’t it? But I didn’t want to be there, because to be there would have been like accepting that Catalina was dead. How could I go through the motions of a phony funeral when I was completely certain that my sister was still alive? They’d all given up on her; I hadn’t. As they were all gathering to mourn her, I was searching the internet for someone who could help me. That’s when I found Klein.’
‘You mentioned him before. Who is he?’
‘A former police detective who’s supposedly the best private investigator in Germany. Certainly the most expensive. I hired him to find out what the police couldn’t.’
‘And did he?’
Raul sighed. He dug in his jeans pocket and came out with a rumpled, folded envelope that he handed to Ben. ‘This came two days ago.’
The postmark on the envelope, stamped MÜNCHEN – FREISTAAT – BAYERN, was five days old. Ben took out the letter and unfolded it. The letterhead on the single sheet said LEONHARD KLEIN, DETEKTEI – NACHRICHTEN, with an address in Munich, email contact and web address. The rest of the letter was written in English. It was brief, stilted and to the point, expressing the investigator’s professional opinion that, despite the absence of a body, after extensive researches he had been able to uncover no evidence to disprove the tragic and unavoidable fact that Ms Fuentes was, in fact, deceased as the official reports stated. He was willing to continue working on the case, although he was ethically and professionally bound to instruct his client that such a course of action was inadvisable and that any further investigation was futile at this stage and would only represent a further waste of his time and the client’s money, etc., etc. The letter signed off with a couple of short lines of stiff-sounding condolences.
Ben folded it, replaced it in the envelope and handed it back without a word. He understood now that the letter was what had sharpened the torture of what Raul was going through, and made him want to dive inside a bottle.
‘It’s garbage,’ Raul said. With a sudden flash of anger, he tore the letter apart and hurled the pieces away. ‘So much for the great detective. There goes five thousand euros cash, for nothing.’
‘Should have put it on your credit card,’ Ben said. ‘Pay it off month by month.’
‘I don’t have a credit card. I come from a simple family, where we were taught old-fashioned values. I pay cash for things whenever I can, and if I can’t afford something, then I don’t have it. That five thousand was most of the savings I had.’
Ben didn’t know what to say. He stood, paused for a long time and chose his words carefully.
‘I’m very sorry for what you’re going through, Raul. But I think you’re just going to have to accept that your sister’s dead.’
Raul stared at him. A muscle twitched under his eye.
‘I wish you well,’ Ben said. ‘Try not to get into any more fights. And don’t drink yourself to death.’
He left Raul Fuentes like that and walked back outside into the narrow, sloping backstreet, feeling bad. He shook out a Gauloise and clanged open his Zippo and lit up. Now he could do with a drop or two of the hard stuff himself, but he wasn’t going to. Not right now.
It was early evening, and the warmth of the sun was cooling off quickly. He made his way back through the streets of the old Moorish quarter of Frigiliana until he found the bus station where he’d arrived earlier that day. A queue was forming. He joined it, finished his cigarette and lit up another. A woman in front of him in the queue turned around, sniffing the air, and gave him a look as if he was spraying anthrax spores. He ignored her and carried on smoking.
By the time that one was smoked down to the stub, the bus arrived. The passengers filed on board. Most had tickets. Ben didn’t, and fanned out some banknotes to the driver without saying anything, like some foreigner on holiday who couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. The driver gave him a ticket and change, and Ben wandered up the length of the bus and found an empty window seat towards the rear. He placed his battered old green canvas bag between his feet and leaned back, soaking up the bustle and the snatches of Spanish conversation around him as the bus filled up.
The motion of life. People going places. And he supposed he was one of them.
In truth, he hadn’t even bothered to check the destination of the bus before getting on. His personal compass needle was pointing anywhere but here, and anywhere was good enough for him. You keep moving forwards, you don’t slow down for anything or anyone. You don’t get sidetracked, and that way you stay out of trouble. There’d been enough trouble in this town already to last him a while. The bus was headed somewhere else down the road, and that was good enough for him.
The sticker on the window glass next to him said NO FUMAR, and he didn’t particularly want to antagonise his fellow travellers any more than necessary, so he kept his Gauloises and his Zippo in his pockets. In the olden days he’d have been carrying his well-worn hip flask for company, filled with his favourite single malt scotch, but he’d ditched that a long way back. So with nothing much else to pass the time with, he gazed idly out of the window while waiting for the bus to depart.
And that was when he saw her walking down the street. She was with a group of friends, all around the same age, late teens or early twenties. She was blonde and blue-eyed, wearing jeans and a light denim top, her hair most likely dyed and cropped short, a little spiky, a little punkish, giving her an elfin or pixie kind