Читать книгу The Gilded Seal - James Twining - Страница 22

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.

‘Still wearing Chanel?’ Tom smiled as he stepped back and let Eva into the room.

‘If that’s a line, it’s a bad one,’ she sniffed, brushing past and then wheeling to face him. In the intermittent neon glow she looked even more striking than he remembered: dark oval eyes glinting impetuously, an almost indecently suggestive mouth, shimmering black hair held off her face by an elasticated white band and tumbling down on to olive-skinned shoulders that might have been modelled on a Canova nude.

‘I heard you’d gone straight.’ She sounded sceptical.

‘I’d heard the same about you,’ he said softly, trying to keep his eyes on her face rather than tracing a line from her slender ankles to her skirt’s embroidered hem and the suggestive curve of her legs. Now, as when he’d first met her, she radiated sex. It wasn’t deliberate, it was just the way she was. The animal dart of her pink tongue against her lips, the generous heave of her breasts under her black silk blouse, the erect nipples brushing the material, the open thrust of her hips. Sex seasoned with a hint of unpredictability and a dash of temper for good measure.

A pause.

‘It’s good to see you again, Eva.’

He meant it.

‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded.

Her tone didn’t surprise him. Their break-up had been messy. She’d been hurt. No reason she should be anything other than cold with him now. In fact, it made things simpler.

‘Same as you. Looking for answers.’

‘He’s dead.’ Her voice was hollow. ‘What more of an answer do you want?’ She paused, her eyes boring into his. ‘Go home, Tom. You’re not needed here. You’re not wanted here.’

‘He left a message before he died.’

‘I know.’ She gave a sad nod. ‘They showed me the photos.’

‘Then you saw who it was addressed to?’

‘You two and your little codes and secrets.’ Her bottom lip, pink and full, jutted out indignantly, nostrils quivering.

‘It was never like that,’ he insisted.

‘Yes it was. Rafael only ever invited me in when it suited him. And even now that he’s dead, nothing’s changed.’ Tom remembered now that she’d always insisted on calling her stepfather by his first name.

‘What was he mixed up in?’ Tom pressed.

‘I don’t know. Things were never simple between us.’ She fixed him with an accusing stare. ‘You walking out on me didn’t help. It forced him to pick sides.’

‘Is this about Rafael, or us?’

Eva flew forward and slapped Tom across the cheek, the sharp crack of the blow echoing around the room.

A pause.

‘Feel better?’ Tom asked slowly, rubbing his face.

‘Go home, Tom,’ she said wearily.

‘He came to see me in London.’

‘What?’ This, finally, seemed to have registered.

‘Three or four weeks ago. I don’t know what he’d got himself involved in, Eva, but I think he was in trouble and that he wanted my help. He stole part of a Napoleonic dinner service. An obelisk. What was he up to?’

She looked down, the toe of her black patent leather shoe poking absent-mindedly through the debris strewn across the floor.

‘He lied to us, Tom.’ She glanced up, looking unsure of herself for the first time. ‘He lied to us all. I could tell from his voice. He’d signed up for another job.’

‘For Milo.’ Tom nodded, thinking back to the unfinished letter M scrawled in blood across the base of the well. ‘Have you checked the drawers yet?’

‘What do you mean?’

He pulled one of the drawers out, emptied what remained inside it on to the floor, and then released a small catch underneath. The bottom of the drawer folded back, revealing a hidden compartment about an inch deep. It was empty.

‘He used to hide things he was working on in these,’ Tom began, before realising from the expression on Eva’s face that this was yet another secret Rafael had not chosen to share with her. Maybe she had a point after all.

‘Open them,’ she muttered hoarsely.

There were six drawers, but like the first, they were empty. All except the final one. This opened to reveal a painting. A painting that a small part of Tom had almost been expecting to find. There could be no doubt now that the two cases were connected.

‘Is that a da Vinci?’ Eva exclaimed.

‘It’s the Madonna of the Yarnwinder,’ Tom confirmed grimly as he carefully lifted it from the drawer. ‘But it’s not the original. That was stolen a few days ago by Milo. This must be one of your father’s forgeries. I expect that’s what his killers were looking for when they turned this place and his apartment upside down.’

‘You mean all this was for a stupid painting?’ Her voice broke as she gestured, the sweep of her arm taking in the ransacked room but also, Tom knew, the invisible trail of blood that led to the courtyard on the other side of the city. She pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to keep her emotions in check. He said nothing, giving her time to regain her composure. As she lowered her arm, Tom caught a glimpse of the silver bracelet he’d given her many summers ago, before she hurriedly tugged her sleeve back down to cover it. Perhaps she hadn’t totally banished those times from her mind after all.

‘They didn’t take everything,’ he said gently. ‘They left you this –’

He handed her the photo he had found on the floor. This time there was no holding back her tears.