‘You know that things didn’t happen as you’ve said. I’m giving you a chance to tell me the truth now.’
‘I have no idea what you mean.’
Caldas unfolded the missing persons report. ‘I know that you and your shipmates spent a few hours in Aguiño.’
Valverde turned back towards the house for a moment before replying, ‘Who told you that?’
‘Is it true?’
This only drew a snort from Valverde.
‘Is it true or not?’
‘It was a long time ago,’ said Valverde. ‘I don’t remember clearly.’
‘Don’t give us that. Is it true or isn’t it?’ said Estevez, taking a step forward.
‘What do you want me to tell you?’
Caldas gave him the same answer he had given Arias a little earlier: ‘The truth.’
Valverde stared at the ground, shaking his head.
‘I can’t.’
‘One man has already died,’ said the inspector. ‘Two if you count Sousa.’
Valverde now met his gaze. ‘I know.’
‘Yet you still won’t say what happened on the boat that night?’
Valverde said nothing.
‘You won’t tell us what happened to Captain Sousa?’ the inspector persisted.
‘I can’t,’ repeated Valverde.
‘What are you afraid of?’
‘As I said to you before, anyone can feel afraid.’
‘What are you and Arias so scared of?’ continued Caldas. ‘What happened that night?’
Just as Arias had done earlier on the slipway in the harbour, Valverde took refuge in his failure to remember, like a tortoise retreating into its shell.
‘Would you like me to jog his memory?’ Estevez whispered in the inspector’s ear. Caldas knew just how his assistant would accomplish this.
‘No,’ he said quietly, and then warned Valverde: ‘Maybe a judge can make you talk.’
‘Maybe, Inspector Caldas,’ said Valverde. ‘Maybe.’
*
Estevez turned the car around in the courtyard and set off up the hill between the closely packed houses. The large wooden gate closed behind them.
‘He’s scared shitless,’ said Estevez. ‘They both are.’
‘I know,’ said Caldas.
‘Why didn’t you let me have a go?’
‘A go?’
‘You know …’
‘Right.’
Caldas opened the window slightly and closed his eyes, but Captain Sousa’s weather-beaten face appeared behind his eyelids so he opened them again.
A Catch at the Lighthouse
‘I’ll be five minutes,’ said the inspector, opening the car door. He walked up the hill to the Templo Votivo del Mar and went inside. He soon returned, holding an envelope.
‘What have you got there?’ Estevez asked as Caldas climbed into the passenger seat.
‘A photo of the crew of the Xurelo. We’ll go to Aguiño on Monday. I want to see if anyone recognises them.’
Estevez glanced at the photograph. In the foreground, Captain Sousa was sitting on a stool, his woollen cap pulled down to his eyebrows. The three younger men stood smiling behind him, in their waterproofs.
‘Are we going back to Vigo?’ asked Estevez.
‘Would you mind if we stopped off at the lighthouse?’ said Caldas.
Estevez sighed and set off for Monteferro, but instead of taking the paved road to the summit, he turned right, along the track leading to Punta Lameda, driving through the eucalyptus woods and skirting around the mountain.
There was a yellow car parked by the lighthouse and Estevez pulled up behind it. The sky was blue and waves crashed against the rocks with great surges of foam. The Cies Islands rose straight ahead, their white sandy beaches gleaming in the morning sun. There was no one around.
They made their way to the place where Castelo’s boat had been found. The rock barrier that sheltered the pool was partly visible. The air smelled of forest and sea, and screeching seagulls could be heard above the roar of the waves.
Caldas went to stand on a smooth rock, close to the water’s edge but beyond the reach of splashing waves. Out at sea, he glimpsed the triangular white sails of racing yachts. Two huge freighters from Vigo were heading for the mouth of the ria. Caldas could make out the containers on the deck of the nearest one. He could also see the lifeboats beneath blue covers, beside the gunwale. He reflected that he wouldn’t have been able to see it all so clearly on the morning of Castelo’s death, when sheets of rain would have obscured the view.
As he watched the wake fade behind the freighter, Caldas thought of the previous night. While tossing and turning in bed longing for the sound of Alba’s pendant jingling, he had found a small space in his mind for Justo Castelo’s murder. If no boats had set out that morning from the ports close to Panxón, maybe the murderers had come from a larger vessel. Caldas lit a cigarette, cupping the lighter with his hand to shield it from the wind, and looked out at the freighter again. He wondered if the skipper of a ship would allow one of its dinghies to be lowered without good reason.
Caldas stood leaning over the pool, reflecting that only someone who plied the coast regularly would know about the small reef that protected it from the waves. Only someone familiar with the shoreline of Monteferro would know that the pool was sheltered by a rock barrier and that at low tide the water there was quite still.
As he took another drag on his cigarette, the wind blew the smoke in his eyes. When he opened them again the freighter had grown smaller on the horizon. The ship was moving out to sea, and the idea of a murderer from elsewhere receded with it.
‘I still think it’s stupid sinking the boat right next to the shore when you could do it out at sea,’ said Estevez, coming to stand beside him.
‘We went over all that yesterday.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Estevez. ‘And you convinced me about the spanner. They can’t have cared where it landed. Like you said, no one investigates a suicide.’
‘That’s what I think.’
‘But this is different,’ said Estevez.
‘This?’
‘The sunken boat. No one would look for a weapon if they believed El Rubio had thrown himself into the sea, agreed, but they’d still look for the boat. So why leave it here?’
‘Because the water at the bottom of the pool is quite still and the boat would stay down there much longer.’
‘But why did they want to hide it?’
‘So that prints would be washed away, I assume.’
‘What prints?’ asked Estevez. ‘If they attacked him from another boat, they can’t have left many. Anyway, this pool doesn’t have special cleansing properties. I don’t see any difference between sinking the boat here and doing it elsewhere.’
Caldas saw this was true. In any case, the boat wouldn’t have needed to be underwater too long before all clues were erased.
‘If I was faking that fisherman’s suicide,’ Estevez continued, ‘I’d have left the boat adrift for the current to dash it against rocks. I wouldn’t have brought it round this side of the mountain.’
‘But what if someone had found it before it sank?’
‘They couldn’t have,’ replied Estevez. ‘I’d have made a hole in the hull to make sure it went down before I jumped back to the other boat. All they’ve achieved by sinking it in here is letting us know for sure that it wasn’t El Rubio who brought it here, don’t you think?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Caldas. He remained on the rock, smoking, while Estevez went down the slope away from the lighthouse.
‘There are two guys down there,’ said Estevez when he returned.
‘Where?’
‘One in a boat and one on the rocks.’
Caldas followed him, first down the slope, then from rock to rock. When his assistant leaned to peer over the cliff edge, the inspector did likewise.
As Estevez had said, there was a man in a dinghy and another perched on a rock surroun
ded by sea spray, tethered to the boat by a harness he wore over his wetsuit. He was gripping a scraper in one hand and a couple of plastic bags hung from his belt. The other man was keeping the dinghy a few metres away. He was holding on to the end of the rope and adjusting the throttle to keep from being dashed against the rocks.
‘They’re collecting percebes – gooseneck barnacles,’ said Caldas.
When the sea withdrew, the man on the rock climbed down to the dark exposed strip and scraped barnacles off the rock with his spatula. Then, when his companion in the boat warned him of the next incoming wave, he scrambled back up to safety. Sometimes he got away with bags full of percebes, but at others he barely escaped with his life.
‘Is that how they’re always collected?’ asked Estevez, sounding surprised.
‘Yes,’ said Caldas. ‘They form colonies on the rocks, in places where the sea beats against them. You’ve got to look for them there.’
Estevez whistled. ‘Now I know why they’re so expensive.’
‘And so delicious,’ added Caldas, who could think of no better company at table than a plate of percebes. He loved nothing more than shelling one of the barnacles and savouring the intense briny taste of its flesh.
‘How do they get them when the weather’s bad?’ asked Estevez.
‘You don’t get percebes when the weather’s bad,’ replied Caldas, who hadn’t seen any in the display cabinet at the Bar Puerto for weeks.
‘I don’t understand it,’ said Estevez as the man scrambled out of the way of another wave.
‘What don’t you understand?’
‘Why they risk their lives like that.’
Caldas shrugged. ‘They need to eat.’
‘Well, they should eat something else,’ said Estevez gravely.
The inspector looked at him out of the corner of his eye and Estevez burst out laughing.
A little later, his bags full, the man on the rocks jumped into the water and the other man hauled him to the dinghy by the rope. Once he was aboard, they sailed away from the coast.
‘Are we heading back, Inspector?’ asked Estevez, still slightly flushed from laughing.
They were almost back at the car when they heard the drone of a boat engine nearby. They peered over the lighthouse wall and saw the percebes collectors in their dinghy. They were approaching the pool where Castelo’s boat had been found. The policemen watched as the pilot steered the craft between the rocky shoreline and the reef protecting the pool. Caldas thought of the bad weather the previous Sunday. The murderers would have had to perform the same manoeuvre in much heavier seas. Only someone with great experience would have dared attempt it.
The man in the wetsuit climbed out of the dinghy with the bags of barnacles, and waved goodbye to his companion.
‘Now we know who the yellow car belongs to,’ murmured Caldas.
Estevez nodded. ‘Why have they landed here?’
‘Because they’re doing this illegally,’ said Caldas quietly. ‘They must have over twenty kilos of percebes there. If they came ashore in a harbour they might be reported, or worse.’
The dinghy sailed away and the policemen waited by the lighthouse while the fisherman climbed the hill. He looked about twenty. He was slim, of medium height, and the sea water had made his hair curl.
He looked surprised when he saw another car parked near his at that early hour, and even more so when the two men leaning on the lighthouse wall headed towards him.
‘Good morning,’ said Caldas.
The man raised his eyebrows in response and continued on his way.
‘You’ve done pretty well there,’ the inspector continued, pointing at the bags of percebes.
‘Well …’
‘Could we have a word?’
‘You’re from the police, aren’t you?’
‘That obvious, is it?’
The young man nodded.
‘It’s not about the catch,’ Caldas reassured him. ‘We just want to ask you a few questions.’
The man put the bags down, as if lowering weapons. He said he was from Panxón but worked in Vigo. At weekends, if the weather was good, he and his brother got to Monteferro at dawn, supplementing their income with what they found on the rocks.
‘Were you here last weekend?’ asked Caldas.
The boy shook his head. ‘Seas have been too heavy for the past fortnight,’ he said. ‘That’s why there are so many percebes today.’
‘Can you still get here by boat in bad weather?’ asked Caldas, glancing at the spot where the dinghy had dropped the boy off.
‘Yes, of course you can,’ he replied. He explained that steering a boat into the pool wasn’t difficult for an experienced pilot.
‘Anyone who’s sailed around here can get in, even in rough seas. You just have to go easy on the throttle,’ he said, moving his hand as if accelerating on a motorbike. ‘And make sure the tide’s out so you can see the rocks and don’t get any nasty surprises.’
When they asked why he’d picked that spot to unload the catch, the young man replied, ‘When the tide’s out, it’s like a pier. It’s the only place you can land without being seen. Anywhere else the rocks are too dangerous or you’re overlooked by houses.’
In Caldas’s mind the boy’s words caused an instant reaction, like precipitation in a test tube. How had it not occurred to him earlier?
‘Do many people know this place?’ he asked.
‘The lighthouse?’ said the boy.
‘The place you landed,’ clarified Caldas.
‘The fishermen from the village know it.’
‘Right.’
‘But others know about it as well,’ added the young man, jerking his head in the direction of the two parked cars. ‘You can get here by car.’
Caldas rubbed his face and rummaged in his jacket for his cigarettes. He lit one and said, ‘I think I now know why they sank it here.’
‘Why?’ asked Estevez.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ he said. Then, addressing the young man, ‘You can go.’
‘What about the percebes?’ he asked hesitantly.
‘Take them,’ replied Caldas. ‘You collected them.’
The man thanked him and hurried away with a bag in each hand and a smile on his face.
‘One more thing,’ called out the inspector.
The young man turned around. He’d stopped smiling, but he grinned when Caldas asked:
‘How much do you want for a couple of kilos?’
Once the clandestine fisherman had driven off, Caldas set out his theory for Estevez.
‘I don’t think they came to the pool to dispose of the boat. I think they left it here because it was the only place they could land where they were safe from prying eyes.’
‘Say that again?’ said Estevez.
‘I’m saying that while one of the killers left in his boat – the one they boarded El Rubio’s from – the other one brought Castelo’s boat here. But not to sink it, just to land without being seen.’
Estevez looked around. He could see nothing but water, rocks and trees.
‘Why didn’t they both leave in the other boat after throwing Castelo into the sea?’
‘Maybe they didn’t want to be seen together,’ suggested Caldas.
‘Maybe,’ agreed Estevez. ‘But why did they sink the boat?’
‘You said it yourself: because El Rubio’s body was round the other side of the mountain. That’s why they didn’t simply want to leave his boat adrift. It would have seemed odd for the body to turn up on one side of Monteferro and the boat on the other. They needed to land here, so they had to sink the boat here, too.’
The inspector climbed back down to the edge of the pool and Estevez followed.
‘See the rocks piled up by the wall?’ asked Caldas. ‘They’re like the ones found in Castelo’s boat. I think that after jumping ashore they threw the rocks down from up there to make a hole in the hull to make sure the boat stayed on the bottom.’
‘B
ut if things happened like that, if one of them landed here, where’s the other boat?’ asked Estevez. ‘No boats went in or out of any of the local harbours last Sunday.’
‘We’ll have to ask further afield.’
Estevez snorted. ‘Has it occurred to you that maybe the other boat doesn’t exist, Inspector?’
‘So how did they reach Castelo?’
‘Maybe someone was hiding on his boat, waiting for him.’
‘We’ve already been over this: Castelo was the only one aboard when he left the harbour. Hermida’s wife saw him from her window.’
‘That woman’s getting on a bit,’ said Estevez. ‘And it was dark. She could have got it wrong.’
‘She could,’ said Caldas. ‘But Castelo would have spotted if anyone was on board. The wheelhouse of his boat has windows, like Arias’s and Hermida’s, and his traps were piled up on the jetty. He’d have known if there was someone else on his boat.’
‘It was dark,’ Estevez repeated.
‘But the woman saw him turn on his light. I’m telling you, there was nowhere for anyone to hide. They had to get to him by sea, and there had to be more than one of them.’
Caldas set off back up the hill to the car.
‘So how do you explain that they knew El Rubio was putting out to sea that morning?’ asked Estevez, walking along beside the inspector.
Caldas stopped and threw open his arms. It was the second time in two days that his assistant had asked him the same question.
Security Systems
Leaving the lighthouse behind, they drove along the potholed track that ran first beside the sea, then through the pale trunks of the eucalyptus grove. The trees’ sharp fragrance blew in through the car window on chill air that gusted over the inspector’s face.
When they reached the road, Caldas looked out and asked his assistant to slow down as they drew near to the first few houses.
‘What are you looking for?’ asked Estevez, surprised to see the inspector peering like a bird of prey, instead of sitting with his eyes closed as he usually did in the car.
‘I want to see if any of these houses have security cameras,’ said Caldas. ‘You check on that side, will you?’
Death on a Galician Shore Page 24