too busy with her thoughts for appreciation of landscape or the city vista that sprang out before them as they reached the level of the road.
‘Now we’ll go to the church,’ Berrocal announced.
Fiona concealed her impatience. She wanted to start work properly, not waste any more time looking at crime scenes. At this rate, she’d have been as well going back to the hotel with Kit. It would have been about as useful.
* * *
A couple of hundred feet above the panoramic route Fiona was travelling back to the city, Kit was opening a heavy pair of wooden shutters with ornate iron fittings. Light flooded into the room and he whistled softly at the view. The Parador Conde de Orgaz, named after the city’s most famous El Greco, sat on top of Emperor’s Hill with a breathtaking panorama of Toledo laid out before it. The almost unreal vision still bore a remarkable resemblance to the background of dozens of other El Grecos, in spite of the intervening four and a half centuries. The parador was perfectly sited on the bluff opposite the city, and their room commanded a view of the whole medieval city. Kit decided to fall prey to temptation.
Twenty minutes later, a taxi deposited him by the Plaza de Zocodover, a lively square which his tour guide claimed was the heart of social life in the city. Lined with cafés and cake shops, its tall shuttered buildings had an air of slightly decayed elegance. It appeared to be a typical provincial southern European city, Kit thought. Women sturdily crossing with their heavy bags of shopping, elderly men sitting smoking and chatting, teenagers in branded leisurewear lounging in doorways and on corners, furtively eyeing the opposite gender in between posing for their benefit. But it hadn’t always been like this.
Toledo, he knew from his reading, had been captured first by the Romans, then by the Visigoths, next by the Moors and finally by the Christians. Although it had become the capital of Castile and the base for the medieval military campaigns against the Moors, it had also established a reputation as a haven of cultural tolerance.
But all that had changed with the dynastic marriage of Fernando of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1479. Isabella’s personal confessor was Cardinal Tomas de Torquemada, the man appointed by the Pope as the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition.
Kit had told Fiona only that he was interested in seeing the El Grecos in Toledo. But that was merely a fragment of the truth. What had drawn him to this city was the prospect of walking the very streets Torquemada had walked, many of them virtually unchanged since the fifteenth century and earlier. He wanted to let his imagination carry him back in time to an era when the streets of Toledo were tainted with fear and hatred, when brother denounced brother, when ordained priests invented torture methods so robust they were still in use, when the state perverted a religious crusade into a means to enrich itself.
Toledo was a city that, by conquest and oppression both, was soaked in the blood of its people. The tantalizing prospect of discovering how much of that atmosphere had persisted was what attracted Kit’s imagination.
It wasn’t hard to erase the modern images and see the streets as they must formerly have been. The buildings were the same, tall tenements with narrow twisting passages between them, their facades alternating between patched eroded brick and pale stucco that had generally seen better days. Studded with windows shuttered against the September heat, the only thing that broke up the frontages were lines of washing strung across the alleys.
As the siesta approached, the streets emptied, and Kit found himself mostly alone as he quartered the warren of streets between the cathedral and the monastery church of San Juan de los Reyes, following his map into the old Jewish quarter, the Juderia.
He climbed a flight of steps that took him up between high blank walls and opened out in a small garden with benches that provided a spectacular vista. But contemporary panoramas were not what he was seeking. Kit let his mind wander from the present and stared down over the pale terracotta roofs, blanking out TV aerials and satellite dishes, drifting back into the past.
The Inquisition was supposed to be about establishing a pure-blooded Christian faith in Spain. But what it was really about was anti-Semitism and greed, he thought. But then, most oppressive right-wing movements had similar roots. Back then, the Spanish Jews were seen as too powerful and too wealthy. From being comfortable, safe and prosperous, their lives had been plunged overnight into a living hell.
A kind of hysteria must have swept through the cities of Castile and Aragon, as anyone with a grudge saw a way of evening the score against their enemies. Carte blanche for the inadequate, the spiteful and the self-righteous, Kit mused.
And once denounced, it was almost impossible to escape unscathed. If there were such a thing as reincarnation, Kit thought, Torquemada had probably come back as Senator Joe McCarthy. ‘Are you now, or have you ever been a heretic?’
It must have poisoned the whole community. No one could have felt safe, except perhaps the Grand Inquisitor and his team of helpers. After all, they had a special dispensation from the Pope. If anyone died under torture or if some other mistake were made, they had the power to absolve one another so their hands and their souls could remain stainless.
And now, another killer was stalking the streets of Toledo, revisiting old nightmares and casting a dark shadow over this tourist playground. His tally of victims might be insignificant set beside the legalized murder of the Inquisitors, but for those touched by these deaths, the pain and bewilderment would be equally intense. That was what Fiona was staring into, and he didn’t envy her one bit. She had her own ghosts, and in spite of what she told herself, he believed the work she embraced did nothing to lay them to rest. But he wouldn’t push her; she’d have to reach that conclusion of her own free will, and she was a long way from there. He didn’t envy her the journey either. The country of the imagination was a far easier place to inhabit.
In spite of the warmth of the sun, Kit shivered involuntarily. It was true that a place retained its spirit. In spite of the beauty that surrounded him, it was all too easy to summon up the troubled spirits of past terrors.
It was, he thought, natural territory for a serial killer.
Drew Shand sat back and rotated his shoulders, grimacing as they cracked and popped. He’d tried every possible adjustment on the expensive orthopaedic chair, but he always stiffened up like this by the end of the working day, exactly the same as he had when he’d sat on a cheap kitchen chair hunched over his second-hand laptop. The electrically adjustable seat had been one of the first treats he’d bought with the famously substantial advance for his first novel. But still he got backache.
He’d thought that his debut was a pretty good read when he’d finished the first draft, but he’d struggled and failed to hide his astonishment when his agent rang him with the news that it had been sold for a mid-six-figure sum. Each of which was to the left of the decimal point. Hot on the heels of that deal, Copycat had been sold to TV, its adaptation winning a clutch of awards for its charismatic star, and sending Drew’s paperback tie-in straight to the top of the bestseller lists on its coat-tails.
More than the acclaim, more even than the rave reviews and the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger award for best first novel of the year, Drew appreciated his release from the soul-destroying job of teaching English to the over-indulged brats of the Edinburgh middle classes. The demands of keeping a roof over his head had forced him to write Copycat late into the night and in snatched hours at weekends over a period of eighteen months. It had been a hard grind, earning him derision from his pals, who kept telling him to get a life. But now,
