James Twining - The Gilded Seal

From the courtyard below came the sound of the gate splintering. Gillez’s plaintive cry echoed up the stairwell. Tom’s Spanish wasn’t fluent, but he knew enough to understand what he was blubbing.

‘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.

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?’

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.