Death on a Galician Shore

by Villar, Domingo

  ‘El Rubio’s?’

  Caldas nodded, and the woman pointed towards the street leading up to the Templo Votivo del Mar.

  ‘Just before you reach the church, turn left. El Rubio’s is a one-storey house painted green,’ she said. ‘You can’t miss it. It’s the only green house in the village.’

  The Green House

  Castelo’s house was easy to find. Set into its green façade were a white wooden door and a window with a black wrought-iron grille. A local policeman was standing at the door, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Inspector Caldas,’ said Caldas.

  ‘Like the one on the radio?’ asked the policeman.

  ‘That’s right,’ Caldas replied, entering the house.

  He found himself in a simply furnished room. A picture of the Virgin of El Carmen hung on the wall, her dark eyes fixing whoever came through the door. To the right there was a beige sofa and a coffee table. A glass-fronted shelf unit contained a television, stereo and stacks of papers. On the other side of the room were a dining table and four modest chairs and, against the far wall, a sideboard on which stood a line of glass figurines and a couple of photographs.

  Caldas crossed to look at the photos. The first showed a football team posing for the camera before a match. Five of the players were crouching and the other six were standing behind them. It was an old photo and Caldas thought he recognised a teenage Justo Castelo in the long-haired goalkeeper. The other, more recent picture showed the dead man with his sister and his mother. White-haired and dressed in black, the mother sat beside her son and daughter, smiling timidly at the camera.

  As he held the framed photograph, the inspector felt a familiar shiver. Dead bodies did not affect him, whether fresh corpses or decomposed remains. Unlike Estevez, whose gruff exterior crumbled before a cadaver, when Caldas encountered a murder victim he had no trouble focusing on the clues that could shed light on the case. To him, a corpse was simply the means of solving a crime, like a picture in black and white. But every personal detail about a victim was a brushstroke of colour that, gradually, revealed the human being hidden in the murder investigation.

  He hadn’t been troubled in the autopsy room the previous afternoon, when Dr Barrio had uncovered the body. But the smile on Castelo’s mother’s tired face made him swallow hard. Caldas felt sorry for the living, not the dead.

  In addition to the front door, two other doors opened off the room. One led to a small kitchen, which was as clean and tidy as the rest of the house, the second to a tiny lobby.

  In the bedroom, a crucifix hung above the headboard of a wide, neatly made bed. A wicker chair stood on one side while, on the other, by the window, was a bedside table with a lamp and radio. Caldas pulled open a drawer and found a veritable medicine chest inside. There was a pot of bicarbonate of soda, several packets of antacid tablets, sleeping pills, nasal inhalers, a thermometer and a number of other medicines he didn’t recognise.

  The window looked on to a small tiled patio with a shed painted the same green as the front of the house.

  There was a glass door in the lobby and he went out through it on to the patio. A pergola covered the area closest to the house, sheltering it from the rain. A couple of boat hooks and other implements were leaning against one of the walls, which was also painted green. On the ground lay a few damaged traps and some large black baskets of the kind fishermen used to land their catch in the harbour, stacked one inside the other. In the top basket El Rubio kept fishing lines and a couple of floats like the one old Hermida used as a key fob.

  Beside the baskets were coiled ropes and a transparent plastic toolbox. Caldas opened it. In its compartments, hooks and sinkers were arranged by size. There were also a number of reels and lures. Some hooks were threaded with plastic worms or other artificial bait. It seemed ridiculous to imagine that any fish with normal sight would be fooled by such crude imitations.

  Caldas crossed the patio to the shed and looked up. The fisherman’s house had been boxed in by blocks of apartments and was overlooked by windows whose blinds would remain drawn until the following summer.

  The little wooden door to the shed had no handle and was locked. He looked through the window, shielding his eyes from the light so as to be able to see in.

  ‘Inspector,’ said a voice behind him, making him jump.

  Caldas turned to find the policeman who had been standing guard outside.

  ‘The sister of the deceased is at the door. She says she’s come to get some of his clothes. Shall I let her in?’

  The inspector went outside with the policeman. Alicia Castelo was waiting, her blue eyes swollen by crying and her hair gathered in a ponytail.

  ‘Inspector Caldas,’ she recognised him immediately. ‘I didn’t realise you were here. I need some of my brother’s clothes. The body’s with the undertakers …’

  ‘Of course, come in,’ said Caldas, so that she wouldn’t have to say anything more. He stood aside to let her in. ‘I’ve just got here. I was looking around.’

  Alicia Castelo went to the bedroom. She opened the wardrobe, took a pair of dark-blue trousers from a hanger and laid them on the bed. She was weeping bitterly as she took a white shirt from a drawer, and Caldas returned to the living room.

  On the shelf unit he found a framed newspaper cutting, dating from the previous November. It recounted how a fisherman had caught a species of tropical fish near Panxón that had never before been found off the coast of Galicia. The newspaper attributed the unusual find to the water temperature, which had been several degrees higher than usual for the time of year. In the accompanying photograph, Justo Castelo was smiling broadly, holding up an almost spherical fish dangling from a hook.

  ‘It was his moment of fame.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Caldas turned to see Alicia Castelo carrying her brother’s clothes draped over one arm. In her other hand she held a pair of shoes almost as shiny as Estevez’s.

  ‘Everyone saw that photo. They even came to interview him for the TV. Justo was so nervous he could hardly speak,’ she said, smiling and sniffing.

  Caldas swallowed.

  ‘Have you and your mother managed to get any sleep?’

  ‘Not really,’ said El Rubio’s sister. ‘The funeral’s this afternoon.’

  ‘I know. I saw the death notice on the door to the fish market just now.’

  Alicia Castelo closed her blue eyes for a few seconds.

  ‘Have you been able to find out anything, Inspector?’

  ‘It’s still too soon to say,’ replied Caldas, replacing the framed cutting about the sunfish on the shelf. ‘Did he own this house?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’ replied the woman.

  ‘They could build an apartment block here.’

  ‘Justo didn’t want to sell.’

  ‘Did anyone ever make him an offer?’

  Alicia Castelo looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘Plenty of people, Inspector. But my brother couldn’t be bought. He just wanted a quiet life. Fishing is hard work but he enjoyed it. And he had very modest needs. When he wasn’t at sea he could spend hours in his shed,’ she said, gesturing towards the patio with the hand holding the shoes, ‘just pottering.’

  ‘I wanted to have a look around in there but it’s locked. I don’t suppose you’ve got a spare key?’

  ‘No, I’ve only got one for the front door. But there’s just a load of junk in there, Inspector. Old boat engines and bits and pieces like that. My mother says Justo only fixes useless stuff.’

  Caldas smiled thinly. ‘How is she?’

  ‘Not too good,’ she sighed. ‘She can’t stop crying and she hasn’t eaten a thing since she got the news. I don’t know how she’s going to react when she finds out his hands were tied.’

  ‘Don’t tell her.’

  Alicia Castelo looked at him just like his father did when he couldn’t tell albariño from treixadura grapes.

  ‘It’s hard to keep anything secret in a small village, Inspector.’
>
  ‘Right,’ said Caldas laconically, and returned to the subject of people keen to purchase the house. ‘Do you know if he’d received an offer for the house recently?’

  She shook her head, swinging her blonde ponytail.

  ‘He may have done, Inspector. I don’t really know. Justo didn’t talk much.’

  ‘Maybe he mentioned it to your mother, or to a friend.’

  Again Alicia shook her head. ‘Justo didn’t have friends.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Years ago,’ she began, and went on to tell him what he already knew: ‘When he got clean, he had several stints working on a fishing boat, the Xurelo. They would spend two or three days at a time out at sea. His crewmates were the only friends I ever remember him having. Justo was happy, but …’

  ‘But?’ Caldas prompted, keen to hear her version of events.

  ‘Haven’t you been told anything about it, Inspector?’

  ‘No,’ he lied. Castelo’s sister sighed.

  ‘The Xurelo went down one night in bad weather. The twentieth of December 1996. I’ll never forget the date, or that Christmas. There were four men on board. My brother and his crewmates were young and managed to swim ashore, but the skipper didn’t. My brother’s a good swimmer but he couldn’t help Captain Sousa. That’s what everyone called him,’ she explained. ‘He never spoke of it, but from then on, my brother was a changed man.’

  ‘Changed?’ asked Caldas, inviting her to go on.

  ‘Captain Sousa believed in him when everyone else treated him like a lost cause. He helped him, gave him an opportunity to feel useful. After his death, my brother became even quieter and, in a way, he became afraid of the sea.’

  Caldas looked at her in surprise. ‘Really?’ he asked, and she nodded.

  ‘He enjoyed fishing, but after that he never sailed out of sight of the coast, or even went out further than he could swim.’

  ‘What happened to the others?’

  ‘The others?’

  ‘The other crewmembers of the Xurelo. What became of them?’

  ‘One spent quite a long time abroad, on an oil rig. He came back to Panxón two or three years ago and now he’s an inshore fisherman, like my brother. His name’s José Arias. He’s very tall. Almost as tall as your colleague.’

  Caldas nodded. ‘How did your brother and Arias get on?’

  ‘When they were on the Xurelo they were close, but that ended.

  When Arias came back, there was nothing left of their friendship. They hardly said a word to each other.’

  ‘And the third?’

  ‘The other one was called Marcos Valverde. He got out of fishing, but still lives in the village. Things have gone well for him. He’s made a lot of money from tourism and construction. I don’t think my brother ever had anything more to do with him either. After the Xurelo sank they each went their separate ways.’

  Alicia fell silent but Caldas could see in her eyes that there was something else she wanted to tell him. She glanced at the photograph in which she was posing with her brother and mother, searching for the right words. When she found them, she said, ‘Yesterday you asked if I’d noticed anything unusual about my brother’s behaviour recently.’ She paused and Caldas nodded. ‘Well, there is something … though it might be trivial.’

  ‘I’m sure it isn’t,’ the inspector said encouragingly.

  ‘My brother had stopped whistling.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Do you know “Solveig’s Song”?’ she asked.

  Caldas had never heard of it and raised his eyebrows enquiringly.

  ‘It’s Norwegian, but it sounds like a Galician song,’ the woman explained. ‘A man from Madrid taught it to us when we were children. My mother used to rent our house to him in the summer. We’d move here, to this house, which belonged to my grandmother at the time, and he and his family would spend the summer at ours. It was terribly inconvenient. My mother and I had to share a bed with my grandmother and Justo slept on the sofa, but with what they paid us we got by for the rest of the year.’

  The inspector nodded, wondering where these childhood reminiscences were leading.

  ‘The thing is, for years, my brother would drop by at the same time every day, give my mother a kiss, pick up the paper and sit down beside her to read.’

  Caldas swallowed again and Alicia went on.

  ‘Every afternoon was the same,’ she said. ‘He would pick up the paper from the table and sit down to read beside her. It was like a ritual. Then, not long after he sat down, he would start whistling “Solveig’s Song”. He did it without realising, as he read. It’s a lovely tune, and Justo whistled like a bird. The same song every day. My mother and I would look at each other and smile when we heard it.’

  Caldas listened in silence.

  ‘But a couple of months ago he stopped, suddenly, from one day to the next. One afternoon, he arrived, kissed my mother and sat down with the paper as usual. But that day there was no “Solveig’s Song”. And he never whistled it again. Do you think it could be significant?’ she asked, her eyes full of tears.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ replied Caldas, resisting the urge to put his arms around her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, wiping away the tears with the back of her hand, the clothes in which Justo Castelo would be buried still hanging over her arm. ‘I’m just being silly. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,’ she wept, and left hurriedly.

  Caldas went back out to the patio and examined the lock on the shed. It was smaller than a normal lock. He thought of the two keys found in the dead man’s pocket and was sorry he hadn’t brought them. He was sure that the smaller one belonged to that door.

  ‘I’m back,’ said Estevez behind him.

  ‘How did you get on with the fishermen on the jetty?’ Caldas asked, without turning round.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Did you get anything out of them?’

  Caldas took his own keys from his pocket and selected one of the smaller ones.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this, Inspector. Those two think the same as the old boy: Castelo committed suicide because that captain drove him to it.’

  ‘Captain Sousa?’ asked Caldas, trying the key in the lock.

  ‘Exactly. What do you think?’

  Caldas didn’t reply. He chose another key.

  ‘They claimed Castelo had received messages from the captain,’ added Estevez.

  ‘Shit,’ muttered the inspector. The key had slid easily into the lock but he couldn’t turn it. ‘Did they say what kind of message?’

  ‘They said Castelo had found graffiti on his rowing boat one morning, and that he’d gone nuts when he saw it.’

  ‘What did it say?’ asked Caldas.

  ‘They claim they didn’t read it.’

  Caldas turned towards his assistant. ‘You expect me to believe that those fishermen saw something on a rowing boat on the slipway and didn’t go and take a look …’

  ‘I don’t expect anything, Inspector. It’s what they said. Apparently El Rubio took the boat straight off to a ship’s carpenter to have the graffiti removed.’

  Gripping the key with white knuckles, the veins in his neck bulging from the effort, Caldas turned.

  ‘So how do they know it was a message from Captain Sousa?’

  Estevez shrugged. ‘That’s what I asked, but I didn’t really get what they answered.’

  ‘Right,’ said Caldas, giving up on the key. ‘Let’s see if you can open this damn door.’

  Estevez stepped back, swung his weight for momentum and kicked the door.

  ‘Bloody hell, Rafa!’ the inspector exclaimed, only just able to get out of the way.

  ‘I thought you wanted it opened?’

  Not only had Estevez opened it, he’d kicked it off one of its hinges. The inspector looked at the broken door, sighed and moved it aside as if it were a curtain.

  He went inside the shed and, as Alicia Castelo had warned, found it full of junk. A
dusty motorbike chassis was propped against one wall beside the shell of an old lawnmower. On a table, in a jumble of parts and tools, lay several dismantled boat engines.

  ‘Do you know where that ship’s carpenter is?’ he asked, re-emerging on to the patio.

  ‘There,’ replied Estevez, pointing towards one side of the patio. ‘He works at the yacht club.’

  Caldas looked at Estevez’s extended finger, then at the place he was indicating. Beyond the wall, between two houses, he saw a tiny patch of sea. How the hell did Estevez find his bearings like that?

  ‘Did you speak to him?’

  ‘I didn’t speak to anyone else, boss. Getting spat at twice in under an hour is quite enough.’

  ‘Twice?’

  Estevez nodded. ‘I only had to mention that dead captain and bam!’ he said. ‘I came this close to chucking the fisherman into the water with a hook through his lip.’

  The Carpenter

  The fish market was closed and only the pungent smell of the dustbins at the entrance betrayed the morning’s business. Up ahead, an old man stopped to read Justo Castelo’s death notice. He perched a pair of glasses on his nose and tilted his head back to see through the lenses. Caldas smiled. For years his father had peered at him over his glasses. They had been thick and metal-rimmed, quite unlike the light pair hanging on a cord around the neck of the man reading the death notice. He had removed them only at night or when cleaning them, first misting them with his warm breath and then wiping them with a white handkerchief which he kept in his right-hand trouser pocket. He had long ago replaced them with a pair of bifocals, but Caldas could still clearly remember the way he squinted as he cleaned the old ones, and the red mark left by the frames, a dent that turned the end of his nose into a white blob.

  The policemen walked past the old man and went through the gate to the yacht club. On the left, steps led up to the clubhouse. Like many other yacht clubs it had been built to resemble a ship, with a curved outline and round windows like portholes on the first floor. Across the courtyard stood the large shed that served as a boathouse. Through the open door, which was painted white and blue like the rest of the place, they could see the shapes of sailing boats beneath canvas covers.