LITMIR.BIZ

       FOURTEEN

       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

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