On the night Madrid hosts the Champions League Final, disaster erupts at the Prado Museum: a guard is murdered and a Caravaggio is stolen.
British art detective Benjamin Blake, hoping for a quiet few days in the city on a low-key assignment, instead finds himself dragged into the chaos he swore to avoid. Suddenly he’s the investigation’s uninvited headache – and possibly its key. Rival mafias begin circling. The Asians want him gone. The Italians want him alive – at least for now. As the cultural bureaucrats drag him into the case to deflect from their own failings, Madrid’s homicide chief – choking on his own lies – wants him nowhere near the case, let alone the truth.
Across the city, freelance journalist Elena Carmona is in Madrid on a separate assignment, digging into the poison of racism in football – an evil that opens into a far wider conspiracy. Trafficking, exploitation and revenge run beneath the pitch and deep into the criminal underworld, drawing her straight towards the same mafias now circling the stolen Caravaggio. As her investigation crashes straight into Benjamin’s, they find themselves at the centre of something far darker than either imagined.
On the night Madrid hosts the Champions League Final, disaster erupts at the Prado Museum: a guard is murdered and a Caravaggio is stolen.
British art detective Benjamin Blake, hoping for a quiet few days in the city on a low-key assignment, instead finds himself dragged into the chaos he swore to avoid. Suddenly he’s the investigation’s uninvited headache – and possibly its key. Rival mafias begin circling. The Asians want him gone. The Italians want him alive – at least for now. As the cultural bureaucrats drag him into the case to deflect from their own failings, Madrid’s homicide chief – choking on his own lies – wants him nowhere near the case, let alone the truth.
Across the city, freelance journalist Elena Carmona is in Madrid on a separate assignment, digging into the poison of racism in football – an evil that opens into a far wider conspiracy. Trafficking, exploitation and revenge run beneath the pitch and deep into the criminal underworld, drawing her straight towards the same mafias now circling the stolen Caravaggio. As her investigation crashes straight into Benjamin’s, they find themselves at the centre of something far darker than either imagined.
Sunday 8 December – Casa de Campo, Madrid.
Alicia’s feet pounded a frost-dusted path in Madrid’s vast Casa de Campo park, each breath forming a misty cloud that vanished into the crisp morning. Her slender frame sliced through the chill accompanied by the dawn chorus of birdsong and the hum of distant traffic west of the city. She loved this time of the day, with the stillness and the solitude. The sun was slowly climbing; the clean light setting the sky a glorious winter blue.
The fabric of her jacket rustled softly with each stride, a faint whisper beneath the sound of her steady breathing. Her dark ponytail bobbed as she veered onto a wider track shadowed by ancient trees … which is when her eyes locked onto the horror that would unfold before her.
There was a white Seat car, wedged in a snarl of bare branches and a mass of dark evergreen. She could hear the engine running, and the vehicle’s tyres squealing as they spun against the ground, unable to gain traction. It was an eerie sound in the otherwise tranquil, sprawling parkland.
Alicia slowed and approached the vehicle, her runner’s high replaced by a prickling sense of something sinister. As she reached the car door, she jumped back, horrified to see a headless corpse sitting in the driver’s seat. The severed stump of a neck gaped with a gruesome, jagged mess of sinew and muscle protruding like the frayed ends of a cut rope. A wide arc of blood, still wet and sticky, had squirted across the dashboard and the inside of the windscreen, soaking the driver’s seat and clothing.
Then she saw the severed head on the front passenger seat. It was facing upwards, its wide-open eyes and mouth hung ajar in a frozen expression of shock and terror, as if caught mid-scream in the final moments of life.
Overcome with nausea, Alicia threw up against the side of the car. Reeling and turning away, she caught sight of a long cable wire, about thirty metres away, with one end tied ominously to the bark of a nearby tree. Forcing herself to look into the vehicle again, she could see the decapitated figure had its seatbelt fastened, with its blood-streaked hands still clasping the steering wheel. The car was in gear, and a foot – it looked contorted or crushed – was pressed down on the accelerator pedal. The doors of the vehicle were closed, but the left rear window behind the driver’s seat was shattered.
She heard a noise – the low growl of another engine. With a sigh of relief, she saw a park ranger’s vehicle rolling into view between the bare trees. She stepped into its path, waving it down.
Fifteen minutes later, Inspector Jefe Félix Barroso stepped out of an unmarked police car, his eyes immediately scanning the scene. His arrival brought a sense of foreboding to three municipal police officers who’d arrived first, his very presence casting a shadow over the already macabre setting. The inspector was Madrid’s senior homicide detective in the judicial police’s UDEV unit. Someone had either dispatched him to the scene, or he happened to be in the vicinity and had heard about it over the radio.
Middle-aged with short, greying hair, Barroso’s stocky build gave him an imposing presence – an image he cultivated as carefully as his grudges. He had a gruff, unapproachable demeanour, and little patience for those who dared to question his methods or his authority. He had sly, appraising eyes that judged people against his own narrow standards, quick to dismiss them for the colour of their skin, where they came from, their gender or sexuality. People said he was dangerous to cross. The truth was much worse – he knew how to make someone’s life very difficult, very fast, and very painful.
He neared the vehicle with slow, deliberate steps. He wasn’t looking for evidence; he was measuring. Weighing. Somewhere behind his eyes, a calculation was already being made. As two of the municipal cops stepped back, he paused and turned towards them, his gaze holding each in turn.
‘Have you touched anything?’ he asked, to whoever dared to reply, and after noting that the vehicle’s engine was still running.
‘Nothing, sir,’ said one of the agents.
Barroso took in the cop’s accent and cut of his uniform. ‘Whose is that?’ he said, sneering and pointing at the splatter of vomit on the driver’s door.
‘The lady who found the car,’ said the agent, nodding towards Alicia standing with the park ranger about fifty metres away. She was talking to the third police officer who was making notes.
Barroso glared in her direction. ‘I want her full details,’ he said, ice in his tone. ‘Then get rid of her.’
He pulled on latex gloves, opened the vehicle’s door and then reached over the headless corpse to turn off the engine, as if calmly selecting a ripe fruit at a market stall.
His eyes lingered momentarily on the severed head, curiously placid on the passenger seat. It looked almost comical; a dark joke set against the gore. Yet Barroso’s face remained an impassive mask, betraying none of the sardonic amusement that tickled the back of his mind. He’d seen this treatment before; it was another message – but he had to appear unfazed in front of the municipal agents.
He stooped as he reached into the car again, using his stocky frame to block his actions from the agent still hovering nearby. His hands moved with the practised touch of someone who already knew what he’d find, or what he’d arrange for others to find.
He unfastened the seatbelt, placed what he needed to place in a side pocket of the corpse’s jacket, then extracted its wallet and checked the ID. He adjusted the dead driver’s shoe against the accelerator pedal, then finally tilted the rearview mirror as if to afford the decapitated head a better view of its former perch. The gesture seemed at odds with the grisly scene, yet it was deliberate – a small act in Barroso’s theatre of investigation.
This wasn’t the first time he’d repackaged a murder as something else, and it wouldn’t be the last. As before, it chipped at something in him. Every staged suicide was a rehearsal, keeping his hand steady for the day he could return the favour for the one real death he’d never been allowed to avenge.
When he straightened, the faintest curl of satisfaction touched his mouth – gone before anyone could read it. He stared at the agent, then sighed on hearing the radio chatter and the sirens in the distance, slowly getting louder as other vehicles approached.
‘Who else have you called?’ he asked.
‘Forensics and –’
‘Why am I even here?’ he said, lip curling. ‘This isn’t a homicide.’
‘Sir, we didn’t –’
‘Look at the angle,’ Barroso said, his voice low. He pointed to the broken side window behind the driver’s seat, then to the wire rope that hung from the tree like a morbid snake. ‘The way the wire is looped, the position of the body … it’s consistent with someone determined to end their own life in a rather repulsive manner. It’s vehicle-assisted ligature decapitation.’ His voice stayed steady, but behind his eyes was a flash of another scene – a younger face, neck twisted wrong, police tape shivering in the wind. He forced it away.
The agent simply stared at him.
‘Look … the driver wrapped the wire noose around his neck, left the rear side window half-open for it to reach the tree to which it is attached. Putting the car in gear and then accelerating, the wire sliced his head off, which bounced off the headrest and against the rearview mirror before landing on the passenger seat. The noose, meanwhile, shattered the back window as it sprung back against the tree. You’ll find body tissue and blood on it, for sure. Have you checked yet?’
‘The vehicle’s registered to –’ started the agent.
‘I know who the vehicle’s registered to,’ snapped Barroso, passing the agent the dead driver’s wallet and ID card. ‘Fabrizio Negrini. An Italian resident in Madrid. Forty-three years old. I’d say he was around ninety-eight kilos and one metre seventy-five, at least with his head intact. Would you agree?’
Barroso spoke with an assuredness that left no room for debate, his tone clipped and commanding.
‘This isn’t a homicide. It’s a case of self-inflicted tragedy – a miserable suicide, nothing more,’ he said. ‘Consider the personal turmoil behind such an act. You’ll no doubt find that Negrini had a troubled past, some history of mental illness. Maybe his wife left him, maybe he was facing bankruptcy, taking antidepressants –’ He reeled off the script, but his mind was elsewhere – replaying old evidence files, old faces, and the one truth he still carried like a knife.
‘With all due respect, sir, surely we should –?’
‘You think I don’t know a suicide when I see one?’ cut in Barroso. His words hit deeper than the rookie could know, but his eyes held a flicker of warning. It was the kind of look that made people glance away, unsure what they’d just been accused of.
‘No, sir.’
‘Suicide,’ he repeated, like a verdict. No hesitation, no doubt – and no invitation for argument. The word tasted bitter, as it always did, dragging up the case file he could never close. One day, he always told himself, the right corpse would end up on his desk, and then the verdict would be his for real.
The agent cleared his throat to speak again but thought better of it.
‘You’re wasting the time of a forensic team,’ said Barroso, not waiting for a reply. ‘Just inform the next of kin. Now – get me the details of that woman over there, then get her the fuck out of here.’
As the agent turned away, Barroso permitted himself the ghost of a smirk.
Back in his car, he didn’t start the engine straight away. He sat with the heater ticking, eyes fixed on the windscreen, fingers drumming the wheel in a slow, deliberate rhythm. The boy’s face came uninvited, same as always – and the promise he still hadn’t kept.
From a distance, still in a haze of shock and wrapped in a police space blanket, Alicia witnessed the detached air of indifference of the plainclothes detective, simply from his body language. It was as if he’d seen it all before. Then when he’d glared in her direction and locked his eyes upon her, a shiver had run down her spine and her heart skipped a beat.
The Madrid Connection is the second book in author Tim Parfitt's intriguing art mysteries Connections series, featuring British art detective Benjamin Blake, but it can easily be read as a standalone novel. With a bevy of well-developed characters, a vibrant setting, and a robust, complex plot, Parfitt's tale had me glued to my seat, wondering how all its intriguing elements would come together.
Benjamin Blake is in Madrid to assist a client with an art restitution case when the renowned Prado Museum is broken into, a famous Caravaggio is stolen, and a beloved, elderly security guard is brutally murdered. When the government's Culture Ministry approaches him to help recover the missing masterpiece, he agrees, not realizing the theft was only the tip of a much more dangerous criminal plan.
Although Benjamin Blake is the engaging main character of the book and series, he is surrounded by several other well-developed characters, each with a strong presence in the complex storyline. Elena Carmona, Kai Leroux, Mie Zhang, Inspector Barroso, Borja Falco, and Lorenzo Martelli all tell critical parts of the story that Blake is attempting to piece together, even as he's warned off the case. I enjoyed these strong perspectives as the story unfolded.
An important aspect of the story is its vivid setting in Madrid, Spain. The city comes alive under Parfitt's touch, and readers get a definite feeling of place. The setting is almost a character in and of itself, with vibrant descriptions of sights, sounds, smells, everyday scenes, and the actions and attitudes of its people.
While the plot is complicated, each separate storyline is developed through the perspective of a specific set of characters, making it easy to keep things straight. Not all is tense and focused on the terrible murders, though, as some of the situations depicted have humorous results for Blake, such as his Airbnb fiasco and his experiences with the BiciMad city bike. However, there are some graphic depictions of violence, but they are appropriate to the scene and story. The author keeps building the suspense with some surprising twists as those investigating the murder and the theft follow the few clues they have, and the seemingly unconnected storylines eventually converge. There are some clever surprises on the way to the final resolution, and the story ends with an intriguing teaser for the next book in the series.
I recommend THE MADRID CONNECTION to readers of mysteries and thrillers, especially those with an interest in art, European football and betting, and Madrid.