Or the Bull Kills You Read Online Free Page A

for harvesting in September. It was too late now, well past twelve o’clock. He’d call him tomorrow some time, if he got the chance.
    The TV continued its coverage of the story as Cámara got up and strolled across his living room to the fridge in his tiny grey kitchen. The rubber seal around the door was peeling away with age, leaving a black stain in its wake: one of the downsides of having to buy second-hand white goods. The fridge contained a single limp carrot, some Manchego cheese with just the hint of a fluffy white mould around the edges, half a can of chopped tomatoes, and two cloves of garlic. But no beer or wine. Convinced he was about to leave the city to escape the Fallas madness, he hadn’t bothered to do any shopping. He turned on the tap and poured himself a glass of water. The maría had made him thirsty, while if he was still going to pop round to Almudena’s, as she had insisted, he’d do well to wash the taste off his tongue.
    He started unbuttoning his shirt as he passed back into the living room, stubbing out the joint in a white marble ashtray he’d stolen from a restaurant when they’d first been going out together. He’d wanted her to have it, but she insisted it stay in his flat.
    Cámara remembered the smell around the body back at the bullring. Had it been Blanco, or just the lingering scent of so much death in that place? He had noticed there was less blood than there might have been.
    â€˜The wounds you see were inflicted after death,’ Dario Quintero, the médico forense , had explained back at the bullring. ‘Hence the lack of bleeding. At a guess I’d say we’re looking at a secondary crime scene here. You need to look for the primary, Cámara: the place where the victim was actually murdered.’
    Quintero was all right as far as forensic doctors went. Others tried to keep their distance, insisting on their role as medical practitioners, associates of the investigating judge and the employees of the law courts, not the police. But Quintero had been doing this for years and didn’t bother with the usual hierarchies of power and responsibility. Cámara had worked with him on the Calle Puerto Rico case a couple of years back – one of the many simple crimes of passion that had taken up most of his three years in Homicidios : couple splits up; husband/boyfriend loses it, grabs gun/knife/something and uses it to kill his beloved, and sometimes anyone else happening to be around, like any kids they might have, or a mother-in-law or two; then moments later, perhaps after a drink with his mates, he is filled with remorse and hands himself in at the nearest police station. Three years of taking statements from shattered men sobbing over their shattered lives.
    Quintero had pulled on his long grey beard as he muttered some more details to the secretaria judicial , Irene Ortiz, who was busy jotting down notes. Time of death: no more than a couple of hours before; anything much more than that and Blanco would still have been fighting bulls here on this very spot with several thousand witnesses to his state of good health. Cause of death: from the marks on his neck, and the burst capillaries in his eyes, almost certainly strangulation, probably with some kind of thong. In addition, from the small cut marks on his skin, Quintero suggested that Blanco’s traje de luces , his shiny, colourful bullfighter’s costume, had been cut from his body.
    â€˜Probably the only way he could get it off the dead body,’ he said, placing his hands into the front pockets of his white coat. ‘And I do think we’re talking about a he . Just the physical effort of killing Blanco somewhere and then bringing his body here makes it very unlikely that we’d be talking about any but the most powerfully built woman.’
    There had been more, though: not just the sword and the banderillas .
    â€˜There’s a deep cut very near the