The Lords of Time

by Eva García Sáenz

  Just then, one of Chipia’s men-at-arms came riding through the South Gate. His horse was slick with sweat and on the verge of collapse.

  “Lieutenant, several fortresses are under attack!”

  “It’s started already?” Chipia exclaimed. “I didn’t expect it so soon. Tell me, which ones?”

  “All the southern garrisons. They’re attacking from the west as well: Puebla de Arganzón, Treviño, Salinas de Añana, and Portilla.”

  “I know the lieutenant who commands Portilla: Martín Ruiz. He’s as experienced as he is tenacious. What more can you tell us? Have they repelled the attacks?”

  “As best they can. But, sire, that’s not all—”

  “What is it? Speak.”

  “Roderico claims he saw a rider on a white horse bearing the flag of Castile, followed by companies of foot soldiers, archers, and crossbowmen, although not many mounted troops. Behind them were cartloads of provisions and a magnificent, covered carriage. It must belong to King Alfonso, and the rider must be his standard-bearer López de Haro.”

  Chipia gave me a worried look.

  “The situation is worse than King Sancho’s advisers led me to believe. Alfonso would not have left Toledo simply to conquer a few fortresses. This is a full-blown campaign. He aims to take Victoria; it’s the main frontier town. I’m afraid, Vela, I will need you to prepare the town for a possible attack. No other man here has your determination. I shall meet with the mayor and the royal bailiff at the Sant Viçente fortress. Meanwhile, assemble the people who live beyond the town’s walls. The townsfolk must find a place for them in their barns and yards: they won’t be safe outside in the event of an attack. We’ve lost the harvest, but tell the farmers to bring as much of their produce with them as they can. Is there anything else?”

  Yennego. You’ve forgotten that everyone should be out looking for my son. I refrained from saying it, to my chagrin.

  “Send a man to the Ajarte quarry,” I forced myself to say. “Tell him to load the carts with stones and bring them here. We will use them to repel any attempt to storm the walls. He must also bring limestone. I’ll explain what it is for later. The forge is freshly stocked with iron from the Bagoeta mines. I’ll tell my sister to order her apprentices to make spearheads. We have neither the time nor the materials to make armor, but the tanners can fashion leather breastplates. Send the woodcutters to fetch saplings for lances, arrows, and crossbow bolts—and to collect firewood.”

  “In summer?” queried Chipia.

  “Tell them to collect firewood,” I repeated. “The cows, pigs, sheep, goats, and other livestock must be put out to pasture and then brought back inside before curfew. I realize we have much to do, but permit me to take a dozen of your men to make a quick sweep. I want to search Los Montes Altos—”

  “I don’t think you’ve understood the gravity of the situation, my dear count,” he interrupted. “After we have brought in everything from outside the walls—all the people, animals, everything we need to survive until King Sancho arrives with reinforcements—I shall order the gates to be closed.”

  “Then we’ll go alone, without any men,” Nagorno declared.

  “No, I need you both here. I am the king’s representative. If you leave now, with danger outside the gates, I will have no choice but to consider you traitors to the Crown.”

  “Give us until the Angelus. We’ll be back before then. I promise,” I pleaded.

  “I know you’re a man of your word, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I let you go now.” He turned toward the man at the gate. “Close the gate this instant! Then go up to the guard walk and open only for people seeking shelter or bringing their animals inside.”

  “Wait, let me through!” a voice cried.

  Alix was running up the causeway where the vendors sold their fruit. She was drenched in sweat, her hair plastered over her face. Her wimple was nowhere to be seen.

  I hurried over to her as she caught her breath.

  “Yennego?” I whispered.

  “I found no trace of him, Diago. Nothing.”

  The lieutenant approached.

  “I’m aware of your misfortune, my lady, but I urge you to come inside. Alfonso’s army is—”

  “That’s why I returned,” she said. “I saw plumes of dust on the Ibida road, only it wasn’t dust….Hundreds of soldiers are heading this way. We’re trapped.”

  37

  THE OLD LECTURE HALL

  UNAI

  October 2019

  Estíbaliz had called the previous evening. She sounded worried.

  “Kraken, I think—”

  “It’s Unai, Estí. My name is Unai,” I corrected her.

  “Unai, I want you to come to the hospital. There’s something I have to show you. But first, get the keys to my house from Alba, and bring me what’s under the heavy sweaters in my bedroom closet.”

  After I had gone to Estí’s house and then visited her in the hospital to hear what she had to say, I called Doctor Leiva and arranged to meet with her the next morning. This time, we wouldn’t be in the pool.

  Marina was waiting for me in an empty lecture hall at the Arkaute Police Academy. She was dressed as she always was—despite her sixty-odd years, she wore slim-fitting suits and sneakers.

  “I haven’t been inside one of these rooms in years,” I said, glancing around. Not much had changed since my training days. The wooden desks were the same, and the bare walls still offered no distraction. Light streamed in through the windows.

  “Teaching is an acquired taste, but you should try it some time. It can be rewarding. I like to have a packed lecture hall. There’s a different energy,” she said, looking around the room. “Young people hanging on your every word, eager to absorb all your advice.”

  “I was like that once. Impulsive. Hungry. That was before I worked the streets. It can change you, make you sick of what you do.”

  “Are you sick of it?”

  “That just came out of my mouth, to tell you the truth,” I admitted.

  Am I sick of it? I thought, puzzled.

  “I’ve brought some documents to show you,” I said, changing the subject. “I need your help. You collaborated with handwriting experts on a case that involved forged wills, I remember.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And you’ve given courses on forensic graphology….”

  She looked at me sideways, placing her red half-moon glasses on the tip of her nose.

  “Come on, show me these documents. What are we looking at?”

  I handed her two separate sheets in see-through plastic sleeves and a pair of my latex gloves. They were a size XL—a loose fit on her tiny fingers.

  “Letters. From Ramiro and Alvar. Alvar and Ramiro. To Inspector Ruiz de Gauna. She called me from the hospital yesterday. Since his fall, Alvar seems to have disappeared. When she and Ramiro Alvar met face-to-face, it didn’t activate Alvar and Ramiro Alvar didn’t recognize her. He apologized to her and explained his condition—”

  “That’s a good sign,” she said, interrupting. “A big step toward his recovery.”

  “I agree,” I said. “Then, shortly afterward, Estíbaliz received this letter from Ramiro Alvar, who managed to sweet-talk a nurse into giving it to her.”

  Marina studied the letter intently. A furrow appeared between her eyebrows, dividing her forehead in two.

  “And…?” she prompted once she’d finished reading.

  “Estí asked me to stop by her apartment on my way to the hospital to pick up some love letters Alvar gave her. Check out the signature here.”

  “Alvar de Nograro, the Twenty-Fourth Lord of Nograro Tower,” she read.

  “Beautiful writing, isn’t it? Nothing like Ramiro Alvar’s. I’m no expert, and neither is Estíbaliz, but the difference between them is—”

&n
bsp; “Startling,” Doctor Leiva finished my sentence for me, totally absorbed in her examination of the letters.

  She placed the two sheets side by side on the desk. After poring over them, she turned to me.

  “This is even better than I expected,” she said at last.

  “Meaning?”

  “Look at Ramiro Alvar’s writing. The block script indicates isolation and introversion. But the backward slant, at approximately sixty-five degrees, is the most remarkable feature: It is rare and has negative connotations. It indicates a struggle for self-control, a suppression of the ego that masks fear and inhibitions. This is the writing of a very sensitive person.”

  “What can you tell me about Alvar?” I asked, pointing to the other letter.

  “This man loves himself. He has a strong, mature mind. He likes to surround himself with beautiful things. He’s a hedonist. In comparison, Ramiro Alvar is an ascetic. Do you see how his letters contain no loops? In fact, they’re almost rigid. But the most interesting thing is that this letter indicates that Alvar suffers from an unresolved conflict over the death of one or both of his parents. See the extended loop at the top of the capital D? That denotes orphanhood. By contrast, there’s no such loop in Ramiro Alvar’s handwriting: his D is balanced—”

  I had been listening wordlessly. Marina was completely engrossed in her analysis, but at this point I had to interrupt.

  “I asked you about this because I’m hoping you can tell me whether Alvar is pretending to be Ramiro Alvar, whether he’s still courting Estíbaliz from his hospital bed because he doesn’t want to lose her. Could this last letter be from Alvar pretending to be Ramiro Alvar?”

  “No, these letters are from two different people. You can usually look at the last word of a sentence to spot fraud, or at the last stroke, which in the case of forged signatures, contains a slight tremor. There’s no evidence of this occurring in Ramiro Alvar’s letter. This handwriting expresses the author’s true intention from start to finish. I’ve seen similar material associated with well-known, well-documented cases of dissociative identity disorder, but this…”

  “What, Marina?”

  “This is more complicated than an individual presenting a dual personality. Unai, I’m going to ask you a strange question: Do you know for a fact that Alvar Nograro is dead?”

  “Alvar? He died a long time ago.”

  “Are you sure? Is there a grave or a niche? Was he buried? Was he cremated?”

  “Slow down,” I said. “I don’t know. But we can’t request an exhumation order for a suspect’s entire family. According to the residents of Ugarte, Alvar was already ill by the time he returned to Nograro Tower, and he died shortly afterward. Although none of them went to his funeral, as I think I told you.”

  “Yes, you did. Isn’t that strange, given that Ugarte is a small village? Wasn’t Alvar a charismatic, handsome young priest?”

  “I don’t know, maybe that’s the reason they didn’t attend.”

  “You need to go back to the apparently normal personality, Ramiro Alvar. He needs to relive the traumatic experience, to pinpoint the trigger that caused his split and created Alvar. Unless this is all a lie, and he, or they, have been deceiving us.”

  “They? As in two separate people?”

  “These letters are so different that I don’t know what to think. They have nothing in common, nothing. Even the pen pressure is different.”

  “Ramiro Alvar is recovering from a bad fall,” I reminded her. “That might affect the strength in his hand.”

  “You need to confront him, Unai. You need to get him to tell you everything. This doesn’t add up.”

  She glanced at her watch. Students were beginning to drift into the lecture hall. Marina handed me the two letters and took off the gloves.

  “One last thing,” she said in a hushed tone. “Your visits to the academy haven’t gone unnoticed. You must realize that you’re well respected—you’re a legend here. The director wanted me to ask you if you’d be willing to give a talk on applied criminal profiling. It would be educational for the students to hear about your experience. What do you think?”

  Her proposal took me completely by surprise.

  “I don’t know what to say. You know how busy I am right now,” I said apologetically.

  “Just promise me you’ll think about it.”

  At that moment, my phone’s ringtone sounded, interrupting us.

  I nodded a goodbye to Doctor Leiva and pulled out my phone as I left.

  It was Milán, who, it turned out, had had an equally hectic morning.

  “Did you go to the Quejana Council?” I asked.

  “Yes. It took forever, but I have a list of staff employed around the complex over the past few years—people who worked at the palace, the convent, the museum, the gardens, and the car park. No names tell me anything. I’m e-mailing you a copy.”

  “Very good. Have you spoken to Doctor Guevara?”

  “Yes. She sent the remains to the Forensics Institute for DNA testing. She’s discovered something very interesting, Kraken.”

  “Unai,” I corrected her. I wanted those closest to me to treat me like a person, not a goddamned myth.

  “Unai,” she repeated. “As I was saying, Doctor Guevara unearthed a few surprises in her preliminary examination.”

  “What are they?”

  “As we suspected, the remains belong to three separate skeletons: two females and one male. But, oddly, one of the female skeletons indicates that the person died recently. Doctor Guevara thinks the body may have been kept outside for several months while it decomposed, and then the bones were placed in the tomb. The other sets of remains are much older.”

  “So, we have the chancellor and his wife, and a contemporary intruder.”

  “It’s too early to speculate. And the analysis will take several weeks.”

  “Have you told the DSU all this?”

  “A separate investigation is being opened; there are no commonalities with the Lords of Time case. This was aggravated breaking and entering. If we assume the perpetrator wanted to desecrate the tomb, then the motive isn’t clear. We could be dealing with a simple act of vandalism. The diocese and the Quejana Council are going to report the incident to the local police. For the time being, unless something was stolen, the cultural heritage people don’t want to get involved. More work for everybody, and Inspector de Gauna is on leave.”

  “Send the forensics team to Quejana, then,” I said, “to see if they can lift fingerprints or find tire tracks. The culprit didn’t get there on foot.”

  “Good idea. If they find anything, I’ll check the database and see if it matches previous thefts at historical sites.”

  “It won’t,” I told her. “This wasn’t a professional job. I’m willing to bet that the culprit has no prior convictions. He didn’t go there to steal. Think about it: He went straight to the tomb. When he heard Don Lázaro on the stairs, he stopped what he was doing and knocked the priest over as he fled the scene. I don’t think he meant to hurt him; a violent person could have easily finished the old boy off, but our perpetrator simply gave him a shove.”

  Milán took a while to reply. I imagined her taking notes on one of the Post-its she kept in the pocket of her baggy duffle coat.

  “If our criminal isn’t a burglar or a vandal, then what is he?” she finally asked.

  “Someone who was looking for something in that tomb,” I proposed. “Someone who had been there before and moved the lid. Someone who had access to the keys at two separate points: once more than a year ago, and then again recently, after the priest changed the lock. Someone who didn’t want this to look like a burglary; if he had, he would’ve broken down the door. No, he just wanted to open the tomb, steal the bones or whatever he was looking for, and leave—without anybody noticing.”

 
“Or it could be a simple prank that got out of hand,” Milán replied hesitantly, “in which case, we may never find the culprit. Either way, we need to prioritize. We have four bodies in the mortuary.”

  “I know. This is a minor enigma.”

  “There’s more, Kra— Unai,” she corrected herself. “You were right to ask about the objects found at the scene of MatuSalem’s murder. Forensics analyzed everything lying on the grass: a soda can, an empty bag of sunflower seeds with about fifty shells, an ice-cream wrapper…And a number-two pencil with a very sharp point.”

  “Which has DNA on it,” I said eagerly. “There’s blood on the tip of the pencil.”

  You’re a damn genius, Matu, I thought. God bless you.

  “How did you know?”

  “MatuSalem spent time in prison. Somebody who’s been inside considers a sharpened pencil a weapon,” I explained. “And, like all professional hackers, Matu didn’t trust the Internet. He carried a pencil with him at all times; when he didn’t want something traced, he used the old-fashioned approach. Thanks to him, we have his killer’s DNA.”

  I left the building and wandered aimlessly along the paths I had taken when I was at the academy. I was lost in my own thoughts: finally, there was a piece of physical evidence, a trail we could follow.

  I’d been feeling lost for some time now, and not just because I was facing the most disconcerting case of my career. I was starting to lose what it was that made me leap out of bed every morning, ready to go to work. I sensed my life had reached a crossroads, and I didn’t want to have to give up any of the paths that lay before me.

  Thank you, Maturana, I said silently. I’m one step closer to avenging your death.

  38

  BEYOND THE WALLS

  DIAGO VELA

  Summer, the Year of Our Lord 1199