‘We can get some,’ said Caldas, going back to his story of the events on Toralla Island. ‘While his lover lay dying the doctor did a great job of cleaning the flat. Any trace of his presence there, whether that night or another, could have been enough to link him to the crime in future and ruin his plan. He must have left the glasses on the living room table for the end, as he would have wanted to wipe the fingerprints off them. But something must have worked against his cold blood and made him flee in a rush. It may have been a light, a noise, I don’t know, but the fact is that he left the building without wiping off those fingerprints. And although the cleaning woman ruined most of them, we were able to recover part of a fingerprint, which we can compare with the doctor’s. If they match, we will have placed Dimas Zuriaga at the scene of the crime.’
‘I still don’t see enough evidence to charge a man like Zuriaga with murder,’ replied the superintendent. ‘Even if, for argument’s sake, the print turns out to be his, it would only prove that Zuriaga has been at the musician’s home. As for the way he contradicted himself, that can be easily explained away in terms of his fear of seeing the pictures come to light. Why don’t you wait for the full report from forensics?’
‘There’s also the DJ,’ said Caldas, who could not contemplate a retreat once he had started charging.
‘Who?’ asked Soto.
‘As I’ve already told you, I think Zuriaga found there were two people blackmailing him. One was Reigosa. But it was his accomplice who took the pictures and sent out emails and instructions to the doctor.’
‘Have you found him?’ asked Soto with interest, expecting more solid evidence than he had heard so far.
Leo confirmed they had.
‘Last night. He worked as a DJ in a gay bar on Arenal Street called the Idílico.’
‘I see,’ said Soto, giving Estévez a reproachful look as he remembered the lawsuit which, thanks to his behaviour, that team of gay lawyers was filing against the police force.
‘The boy said he knew Reigosa,’ said Caldas. ‘He told me Reigosa wasn’t a regular, but went to the Idílico now and then. However, he seemed a bit evasive when I asked him about a man with extremely white hair – the doctor’s most salient physical trait, as you’ve no doubt noticed.’
The superintendent confirmed he had with a slight nod.
‘When I told him Reigosa had been killed,’ continued Caldas, ‘the boy looked like he was scared of something. I got the impression that he didn’t feel safe there, and he refused to talk any further in the bar. We arranged to meet today at five in the afternoon, at a place far enough from where he lived, from the station and from his work.’
‘And what did you get?’ asked Soto.
‘Nothing, sir. The DJ didn’t make it to our appointment,’ explained Caldas. ‘His name was Orestes Grial. He’s the boy who’s turned up with a shot in the back of the neck at a flat on Camelias Road. I’m convinced it was Zuriaga who did him in.’
The superintendent, who’d known for a couple of hours about the new crime in the city, passed a hand over his face.
‘Is that another hypothesis, Leo?’
‘For the moment it is, sir. But the photographs you have on your desk were stored on the dead man’s computer. I bet Orestes’s death happened a little after one, when we left Zuriaga’s mansion. The doctor must have gone to the boy’s house. Orestes worked until seven in the morning, so he must have been sleeping at the time. Orestes seemed quite frightened when I spoke to him. The doctor must have threatened to go to the police if he didn’t open the door. Once inside, he only had to wait for the boy to lower his guard and shoot him. Incidentally, Zuriaga doesn’t remember leaving his house. He claims he’s been at home for days, sunk in depression. His wife, however, casually said that the doctor went out on some errands in the afternoon. It seems our visits have healing powers.’
Soto raised a hand and Caldas stopped his exposition.
‘Leo, all this doesn’t quite fit together. How could Zuriaga have known that you’d been to see Orestes Grial the night before when you hadn’t even paid Zuriaga himself a visit?’
‘He didn’t. But in the morning I’d told him that I had a witness who was prepared to confirm he knew Reigosa. In fact I was only trying to make him nervous, to confuse him and see if I could trip him up,’ explained Caldas. ‘Zuriaga must have come to his own conclusions and decided to kill off the other blackmailer before the boy could talk. Then he pulled the necessary strings to make sure we didn’t come near him.’
‘They must have got tangled,’ replied Soto in a whisper.
Estévez smiled, and relaxed a bit now his superior’s conjectures were seen to be more than mere flights of fancy.
‘A few minutes ago they informed me that a glove’s turned up. I guess you know of it, sir?’
‘Yes, I’ve got the note here somewhere.’ Soto found the paper in a drawer. ‘They’ve found a latex glove in the rubbish bin nearest to the hall of Orestes’s house,’ he said, skimming the text. ‘Apparently, it has traces of powder on it.’
‘If I’m right, sir, we should find Zuriaga’s DNA on the inside.’
‘In that case, the doctor would be in hot water,’ said Soto, who was starting to give in to Caldas’s theory.
‘The pieces will all fit together as soon as Isidro Freire appears.’
‘Who?’ asked the superintendent, who wasn’t familiar with that name.
‘A guy with a little black dog,’ put in Estévez, earning himself a reproachful look from Caldas.
‘Isidro Freire works at Riofarma. He’s the sales representative in charge of the Vigo area,’ explained Caldas to his superior. ‘He’s the one who provides the Zuriaga Foundation with formaldehyde. If you ask my opinion, I don’t think Freire will turn up alive either.’
‘Oh, come on, Leo!’ exclaimed the superintendent, but Caldas ignored the comment and carried on.
‘Isidro Freire is the link between Zuriaga and the formaldehyde, between the murderer and the weapon. I’ve asked for a list of the salesman’s telephone calls, and over the last few days he called Zuriaga’s home number several times. Freire has not shown up at the office today, and he’s not answering the phone either. You know what, sir? If Zuriaga got rid of Luis Reigosa and then of Orestes Grial, I see no reason to believe that he may have spared Freire’s life – that is, if Freire was indeed able to implicate him in the murder of the musician.’
The superintendent remained silent before Caldas’s line of reasoning. The inspector stood up.
‘Now you know what Zuriaga’s doing here, sir.’
Rain
It rained on 20 May. It felt like winter.
At one thirty in the afternoon, Leo Caldas leaned on the bar and asked for some wine as an aperitif while he waited for the luras Carlos had found that morning in the market. Carlos had called him and other regulars to tell them of his extraordinary discovery, and to announce he would stew them for lunch in the traditional way, in a light wine sauce with onions, laurel and potatoes. Attracted by the promise of the small cephalopods, Leo had arrived early at the tavern. The dons were also in front of their wine mugs at that unusual hour. All four of them, like Caldas, normally came to the Eligio in the evening, but they had been bewitched by the idea of the sea delicacy and had fitted it into their schedules.
As on every day in the last week, the front page of the local paper gave plenty of space to the ‘Zuriaga affair’. The case had become a sort of popular lynching of the notable arts patron. Although the trial had yet to start, the press had already sentenced him. They accused him of being a brutal serial killer and a homosexual with depraved tastes.
The doctor still claimed he was innocent, in spite of the mounting evidence against him. His team of lawyers hung firmly to the fact that the fingerprint found on the glass in Reigosa’s flat did not match the doctor’s, which meant there was no proof Zuriaga had been at the flat on Toralla Island at the moment of the crime.
However, there wasn
’t much they could do about the results of the analysis of the latex glove. These confirmed both that the powder on the outside had come from a firearm such as had been used to kill Orestes, and that there were traces of Zuriaga’s DNA on the inside.
The lead picture in the paper showed an exhausted Zuriaga, flanked by one of his lawyers and his niece Diana. The doctor, visibly disheartened, seemed about to concede defeat at any moment. But, in spite of all the difficulties, his niece fought without rest to establish his innocence. As the present spokesperson of his uncle, Diana Alonso Zuriaga took every opportunity the press gave her to publicly call attention to the doctor’s outstanding altruistic career, and to strongly condemn the injustice to which, in her view, he was being subjected.
The doctor’s wife had not shown her face in public. The papers reported she had stayed at the family home ever since her husband had been arrested and was sunk in a severe depression.
‘These people are in big trouble,’ said Carlos, pointing at the paper as he filled Caldas’s mug with wine.
‘They are.’
From a nearby table, a don who was flicking through the paper asked Caldas if he’d been involved in the Zuriaga case.
‘I had something to do with it,’ he replied tersely.
‘They should write a novel about your adventures, Leo,’ said another of the professors.
‘Of course,’ agreed the inspector with a wink.
‘I mean it,’ insisted the don, ‘crime novels do very well.’
‘Well, go ahead,’ said Caldas, taking a sip from his mug.
Caldas mulled over the professors words as he savoured the pleasantly sour aftertaste of the wine.
Suddenly, like a bursting bubble, that nagging feeling he’d had for so many days stopped. And as it did, it brought back a vivid memory, allowing him to identify that which had attracted his attention on his first inspection of Reigosa’s flat but had failed to stay in his mind.
He remembered the dead man’s bookshelves with great clarity, and they had been full of crime novels. He remembered too that one of the books on the night table belonged to that genre. However, the other one, which had a bookmark in it, was something completely different, a nearly eight-hundred-page volume by Hegel.
Although it wasn’t relevant at all for the case, he was relieved.
‘Do you think it’s normal for a man who usually reads crime novels to read Hegel’s Lessons in the Philosophy of History before going to sleep?’ he asked in the direction of the professors.
A bit surprised, all eyes turned to the oldest of the four.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said, as if the others’ gazes forced him to speak. ‘I’d say that, in spite of the metaphors he uses to clarify his theories, Hegel is too rich a meal to digest at bedtime.’
His three learned dining companions agreed.
‘Wasn’t it Hegel who wrote one of the most notorious defences of the Inquisition?’ put in Carlos from behind the bar, showing his background as an experienced manager of the illustrated tavern.
‘You could see it that way, Carlos, though only up to a point. Hegel tends to justify anything that brings mankind closer to salvation – the salvation of the soul, that is. And in that sense you could say he might justify any Torquemada,’ explained the old professor, ‘for Hegel welcomes pain if it’s a cause for repentance.’
Caldas found those words familiar. He remembered a caller had said something of the like on his radio show, and it seemed a strange coincidence. He picked up his mobile phone, dialled the radio’s number, and asked to be put through to production.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you, Rebeca.’
‘Leo, what a surprise! Is anything wrong?’
‘No, I only wanted to ask you whether it would be possible to trace a call we received on the programme. Just out of curiosity.’
‘If it’s recent, there’s no problem. Programmes are recorded and kept on file for a while. What date are you after?’
‘It was last week, but I can’t remember the exact day,’ said Caldas hesitantly. ‘I’m sure you remember it better than me. I’m trying to trace that caller who didn’t let Losada utter a word. A guy who said just one sentence, a bit of an apocalyptic phrase, and then hung up.’
‘I know who you mean. The boss went into a bit of a tizzy after that call,’ replied Rebeca. ‘I’m sure I have it to hand. We keep a record of abusive callers, pranksters and crazy guys like this one. That way, if they call again, we don’t put them through. It’s not a very reliable filter, but it’s better than nothing,’ she explained. ‘Now let’s see … Yes, here it is. He was called Angel, although I doubt that was his real name. The phrase he said was “Let us welcome pain if it is cause for repentance”. He said it twice, quite slowly, and I managed to write it down. Hopefully we’ll recognise him if he ever calls again.’
‘Thanks, Rebeca, you’re a marvel,’ he said, pleased at how quickly the producer had found the sentence. It seemed a bit odd that the caller should have quoted from the very same book that was on Reigosa’s night table.
‘Do you want to write down the number, Leo?’
That was more than he’d expected.
‘Go on,’ he said, borrowing a ballpoint pen sticking out of the pocket of Carlos’s shirt.
‘Anything else?’ she kindly asked after dictating it.
‘Actually, yes. Is it possible to find out what day the call was made?’
‘Of course, Leo. It was 12 May.’
Caldas double-checked the date of Luis Reigosa’s murder. There it was: he’d been killed on the night of 11 May.
After he rang off he experienced that strange feeling that coincidences give rise to. He was about to ring the number that Rebeca had just given him when he thought better of it, and instead decided to ring up the police station and obtain an address.
‘This is Caldas, I need an address for this number, please.’
As he waited, he listened to the professors. Mugs in hand, they were still considering various approximations to Hegel. They had reached the democratic, if simplistic, conclusion, that the German philosopher’s had been an insufferable bore above all.
‘Inspector?’ the voice on the other end of the line said. ‘That’s not a private number. It’s a public phone in a hospital.’
‘Which one?’ asked Caldas with the sense of unease of someone who thinks he already knows the answer.
‘The Zuriaga Foundation, inspector,’ said the officer, thus confirming Caldas’s hunch.
‘Many thanks,’ muttered Caldas and rang off.
He slumped on to a bench by one of the windows in the tavern, and stared fixedly at the raindrops splattering against the glass framed in green wood. He didn’t even move when he smelled the steaming stew that Carlos was bringing to the table.
‘God save the luras!’
The inspector went out into the street.
No one paid attention to him.
Twist
Inspector Caldas walked down between the rows of desks at the police station. As he went past Estévez, he motioned him to follow. He went through the glass door of his office, hung his jacket on the coat rack, slumped into his black leather chair and picked up the phone.
‘What’s the matter, chief?’ asked Estévez.
‘I’d like you to do me a favour,’ replied the inspector cupping the receiver. ‘Call Riofarma, speak to Ramón Ríos, and find out if there’s any news on Isidro Freire.’
Estévez left the office and disappeared among the desks.
‘Forensics? Inspector Caldas here. May I speak to Clara Barcia?’
Since he’d left Eligio’s, the inspector wanted a word with the officer who had led the inspection of Reigosa’s flat. He knew how meticulous Clara’s work was and trusted she would be of help.
‘Clara, it’s Caldas,’ he said when she came on. ‘I’d like to ask you a question about the Reigosa case, at the Toralla tower. Do you remember the book on the night table?’
‘Hegel’
s or the other one?’ asked the officer.
‘Hegel’s. Did you notice anything odd about it? A mark of some kind, a note, a dedication, a label, anything?’
‘Except for an underlined sentence I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, inspector.’
‘What underlined sentence?’
‘There was a sentence underlined in pencil, inspector. It was on the same page as the bookmark.’
‘Do you remember what it said?’ asked Caldas.
‘The sentence? I can’t remember verbatim, but it was a bit morbid, something about accepting pain and repenting,’ replied Clara.
‘Are you sure?’ asked Caldas tensely.
‘More or less, yes,’ she said hesitantly.
‘Why haven’t I been informed of this?’
‘It’s all in the report, inspector,’ answered Clara in a reedy voice.
‘In the report?’
Caldas had not read Clara Barcia’s final report. After Dimas Zuriaga’s arrest, he had considered the case closed and had not looked back. His job was finished once a suspect had been captured and the evidence had been put forward; then the court of first instance took over.
‘I added a handwritten note to the effect that the sentence seemed to confirm your theory of a crime of passion,’ said Clara. Her voice betrayed a measure of surprise at the tone Caldas was employing with her. ‘Did you not read it?’
Caldas didn’t answer. He limited himself to shifting a pile of papers lying on his desk.
‘As the doctor had already been arrested,’ the officer went on, ‘I didn’t think it was necessary to bring your attention to it.’
The inspector turned over a stapled dossier which was hidden under a stack of other documents. It was Clara Barcia’s report, with all her conclusions concerning the murder.
‘Shit,’ muttered Caldas. ‘I’m sorry, Clara, I’ll talk to you later.’
He hung up and quickly flicked through the pages, searching for the transcription of the sentence. He was pretty sure it hadn’t been underlined just by chance. And he confirmed it when he read it: ‘Let us welcome pain if it is cause for repentance’.
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