Death in the Sun by Adam Creed Page B

bridge, not twenty yards from the crashed car – but now it is gone.
    One of the men stands up and strolls up to Staffe, holding his bocadillo of ham like a club. ‘You can’t stand there.’
    ‘Is this a new accident?’ Staffe points at their handiwork.
    The man shrugs. ‘You can’t stand there.’
    Staffe thinks it odd that the men are repairing damage which presents no threat to the motorist, while at the other end of the bridge is a gaping hole that any car could easily go sailing through, the bridge being on a tight, downhill bend. ‘The accident was at the other end, right?’ He peers over the bridge into the barranco . The dry bed of the Rio Mecina is sixty feet below and Raúl’s Alfa Spyder is still down there, its red boot pointing towards Almagen.
    ‘You can’t stand there!’
    Raúl could only have gone into the barranco on his way out of the village, but the damage at the other end of the bridge suggests that perhaps another vehicle had come at him. ‘Was there a car coming the other way? Is that what you are repairing?’
    The workman sighs.
    Staffe peers back down into the barranco , focusing on the Alfa’s bonnet – caved in on its left-hand, driver’s side, from the impact with the bridge’s rails. The front of the bonnet is partially crushed from the slide down the hillside into the river bed. But Staffe’s curiosity is touched by something he sees on the car’s right-hand wing.
    He bids the workman farewell and as he goes along the bridge, he runs his hand along the blue-painted rail, shiny and smooth, but then rough, where the paint is taken away. Thin streaks of red run along the rail. He pauses, watches the workman return to his lunch. For three metres before the breach that the men are working on, the paint is scratched from the bridge’s two rails.
    Just before he gets to where his Cinquecento is parked, Staffe darts down the side of the bridge and clambers down the barranco. The workmen shout at him, but he doubts they will bother to follow. The brambles scratch his arms as he grabs them to stop himself from tumbling and he has to throw himself onto his back to avoid toppling over.
    The sun beats down ferociously on the valley bottom and he is drenched in sweat, crouching by Raúl’s Alfa. He peruses one side of the car and his suspicion is confirmed. On the car’s right-hand wing, two thin strips of blue run like tramlines, where the Alfa had surely crashed into the railings – on the side the men were repairing. The wrong side.
    The workmen lean over, shouting down at him. He looks up and the barranco now seems steeper. The bridge is a long way off.
    Tilting at bloody something, he thinks, ignoring the workmens’ calls and looking in the dry river bed for the blood-soaked rag, finding nothing of the sort – just the rogue bush of wild strawberries, fruit withered and dry, but with a cluster of leaves, petalled red with a smear of what could be blood, fully twenty metres from Raúl’s dead car.
    *
    When Staffe parks up in the plazeta , his neighbour, Carmen, beckons him from the alley that leads to his house.
    Carmen could be anywhere between forty-five and seventy. She smokes the local black tobacco as she tells him that his landlord has been to the house. He came with another man and they had entered the house despite her protestations. When she had stood in their way, the other man had laid hands on her and they had locked the door behind them so she couldn’t even oversee what they were up to.
    ‘Here,’ she says, touching her shoulder as if it were a wound. ‘Here, he touched me.’ They said they had come to check that the water and the gas were working. ‘But that man had never seen a spanner in his life. A plumber? Mother of God!’
    Staffe opens the door to his house and can immediately tell someone has been in because they double-locked the door when they left – something he never does. He quickly goes up to the small studio that leads out onto the roof. As