by Antonio Hill
“I’ll take care of him, sir.”
The station was almost deserted; only Salgado and Fort remained, along with two cleaners, who, after crossing themselves, got to work and rapidly forgot that the station had been the setting for a violent death. The world must keep turning, thought Héctor, unintentionally falling into cliché. Nonetheless, it was almost horrifying that everything could continue in such a normal way. In a few hours the line would reopen, the platform would fill with people. And only scattered pieces would remain of that woman, kept in black plastic bags.
“We’ve found the bag, Inspector,” said Fort. “The woman was called Sara Mahler.”
“Was she foreign?”
“Born in Austria, according to her passport. But she lived here, she wasn’t a tourist. There’s also a clock-in card in her wallet. She worked in a laboratory. ‘Alemany Cosmetics,’ ” he read.
“The family will have to be contacted, although that can wait until morning. Go back to the station, file the report and start tracking down the relatives. And don’t call them until daytime. We’ll let them have one more night’s sleep.”
Héctor was exhausted. His eyelids were heavy from pure tiredness, and he didn’t even have the energy to tell Fort off for making him come. He wanted to go home, lie down and sleep with no nightmares. He would try those damn sleeping pills, even though the word, mixed with what he’d seen there, made him think of a painless death, but death all the same.
“There is something else I want to show you, sir.”
“Do it. I’ll give you five minutes.” Then he remembered that in barely a few hours he was going on holiday with his son, and thought the sleeping pills would have to wait for another occasion. “Not one more.”
Héctor let himself fall onto the bench and took out a cigarette.
“Don’t tell anyone I smoked here or I’ll plaster you.”
The agent didn’t even respond. He handed the mobile to his superior as he said, “This is the only message. It’s strange—the diary is empty and there are no calls. Therefore, this is what she was reading on the platform, before—”
“Yeah.”
Héctor looked at the screen. It was a message with only two words, written in capitals, with a photo attached.
NEVER FORGET
When he downloaded the photo, Salgado understood why Fort had called him and why that Dominican had dragged his brother by the ear to bring back the damn cell phone.
At first he thought they were kites trapped in a tree. Then, after enlarging the photo and seeing the details properly, he realized they weren’t. There was a tree all right, with thick, solid branches. But what was hanging from them, the three shapes suspended by ropes, were animals. The rigid bodies of three hanged dogs.
3
New year, new life … although at the moment pretty much like the one before, Leire said to herself as she looked at herself side-on in the mirror. This was another of the treacherously unprecedented components of her current existence. They’d brought it up from the shop, because from the first moment she’d wanted it to decorate the hall of the apartment she’d just moved into and couldn’t yet call home. She kept seeing herself as a whale in it.
But she’d been very lucky. Everyone said so, and she’d ended up shutting up and agreeing. That apartment, with its high ceilings, with two spacious bedrooms and sun in the morning, was without doubt the best of those she’d visited, and the price, which had supposedly come down a lot in recent times, was in fact the maximum her income would permit. The ad promised “views of the Sagrada Familia,” and strictly speaking it didn’t lie. It could be seen from the wooden-framed window that gave access to a diminutive balcony. However, you couldn’t spend the day looking at those needles that stuck out among the buildings in front, however nice they were. What the ad didn’t say, nor did the woman from the estate agency who showed her the apartment mention, was that the pipes were a hundred years old and got blocked; that the bathroom tiles, a shocking orange color that the woman defined as “happy seventies,” tended to leap into the void because of the damp; and that the radiators were more futuristic ornaments and gave off about the same heat as a Chinese vase. Clearly, she was to console herself about the damp, the cold and the toilet cistern, which sometimes gurgled as if an alien were about to emerge from the wastepipe, by going out onto the balcony and admiring the Sagrada Familia. A total luxury if you were Japanese.
In any case, what made the apartment feel strange to her wasn’t its defects, and of course not its views, rather that for the first time in years it didn’t seem wholly hers. One of the two bedrooms had a cradle, a beech wardrobe and a border of yellow ducks running all around the four walls, dividing the two shades of green that her friend María had chosen as the ideal colors for a baby’s room. And not only that: in part of her wardrobe, which had always been for her alone, some masculine garments had gathered almost without warning.
Overwhelmed, Leire Castro went toward the balcony, happy to be able to move around the apartment without boxes in the way. That was definitely a change. “The first of many, right?” she said, directing her words to the child currently living within her. Sometimes he answered with sudden movements; at other times he seemed not to take the hint. She tried to imagine the features of this baby, Abel, floating inside her, but she only managed to give him a wrinkled face, like a sleeping gnome. Would he look like her, or Tomás? Well, if he looked like him it wouldn’t be too bad, she thought with a smile. “Although best if the resemblances are just physical, hey kid? Otherwise, you and I are going to have problems …”
Tomás had been a one-night stand that then lengthened to three, and later the odd weekend. No-strings sex. Taboo-free sex. And once, only once, although no one would believe it, sex without a condom. But accurate. Tomás’s reaction, after a plate of reheated croquettes that had already acquired mythical status for them both, was that “I need time to get used to the idea,” which in Leire’s opinion was usually the prelude to “This isn’t for me.” Nevertheless, Tomás surprised her by returning just a couple of days later to have a “serious talk.”
And they did, long and drawn-out, weighing up the pros and cons as if it were all a rational subject, and at the same time knowing it wasn’t. In the end, however, they had come to a series of agreements. One, they weren’t in love, at least not in that idyllic way in which you can’t imagine life without the other. Two, they lived in different cities, although separated by barely three hours on the AVE fast train. Three, the baby was part of both of them. So the conclusion, nicer in the wording than in the small print, had been: no, they wouldn’t be a couple—at least at the moment—but they would be parents. “Parents with touching rights,” María called them.
They were satisfied by this resolution and they truly were doing all they could to carry it out. Tomás was spending some weekends at Leire’s; he’d taken care of the move and of tasks like putting in sockets; he spoke of Abel with enthusiasm and threatened to make him a member of Real Madrid. They hadn’t touched on the subject of money; María had bought them the few things in the baby’s room and, with regards to the apartment, Leire didn’t plan on accepting even a euro from him. Until the birth of the baby no more can be asked of him, she thought. Although deep down she would have liked to have had someone by her side at the antenatal classes, at the scans, when the on-screen sight of what was inside her brought out tears she couldn’t understand, or, for example, on Friday nights, when she was too tired to go out but not so tired that she wanted to be alone. Or also during that interminable Reyes bank holiday, she thought as she contemplated the Sagrada Familia, that unfinished witness to her boredom that she was beginning to hate at times. However, Tomás was in the Sierra—the name of which made Leire think of resistance fighters or bandits—skiing with some friends. It wasn’t Tomás’s fault that she had nothing to do and that her best friend, María, had gone away for the weekend, although it hardly encouraged her to think of him fondly. Leire’s mother, Astur
ian and not one to mince her words, had summed everything up in some phrases that were becoming prophetic. “Alone. When the baby is born you’ll be alone. If you cry in the night, you’ll be alone. And the day he learns to say ‘Papa’ you’ll show him a photo. That’s if you have one,” she’d predicted before starting to cut a chicken into pieces with unusual fury. And she, though she didn’t dare say it aloud, had murmured inwardly something along the lines of: “I’ll worry about that when the time comes.”
Nevertheless, the truth was that she sometimes did feel lonely, not helped by her early maternity leave due to some rogue early contractions she’d had in mid-December. She’d already spent months condemned to office work, but at least she was at the station, she could participate in cases, she had people around her. There was still a month and a half before Abel’s birth. Six weeks in which—as she saw it—she would do nothing but get fat, visit her doctor, see other pregnant women and choose baby clothes. She knew by heart all the magazine articles about the best way to bathe, change and stimulate a baby, a distraction already forming a pillar of sage advice that reached half the height of the sofa.
It was as night was falling the next day that, lying on the sofa watching an episode of a detective series that had been shown at least twice before, the feeling of abandonment became so intense that she didn’t even have the urge to cry. The unfamiliar apartment, the lack of obligations and the absence of contact with others, increased by so many holidays, ended up submerging her little by little in a melancholy state in which laziness and boredom also played a large part. “Abel, your mama is being very silly,” she said out loud, in order to hear some sound that didn’t proceed from the television. She felt like crying, like letting the world know she was still there. And, without meaning to, almost automatically, she thought that if she disappeared, no one would miss her until at least Monday. And that with a bit of luck … Her mother called her every day, although certainly, knowing her, she wouldn’t raise the alarm until the mountain of unanswered calls became worrying. Tomás might send her a message over the weekend. Or not. And María, certainly, would scream the place down if she couldn’t locate her on Monday as soon as she got back. But it was Friday. Like Ruth, her boss’s ex-wife, no one would begin to look for her until it was, perhaps, too late. A vague, out-of-character fear overpowered her. You have to stop this, she told herself, and closed her eyes in an attempt to banish so many clouds from her generally clear mind.
And then, when she opened them and saw that nothing would change just by wanting it to, she knew what she was going to do for the remaining six weeks of her pregnancy.
“Leire, you’re on maternity leave.” Sergeant Martina Andreu said the sentence, stressing each syllable. “You’re going to have a baby and the doctor has ordered you to rest. Know what ‘rest’ means? I’ll tell you: no work.”
Leire bit her lower lip, cursing herself for not having foreseen that the sergeant, the epitome of sense, would stop her project outright. Throughout the weekend she had gone over the idea to find the best way of putting it, but that Monday morning her arguments met the devastating logic of Sergeant Andreu head-on.
“Also,” she continued, “the case isn’t ours anymore. Superintendent Savall assigned it to Bellver, you know that.”
“Exactly.” She struggled to find the right words, which, given her opinion of Dídac Bellver, wasn’t exactly easy. She took a breath. At the end of the day she had nothing to lose. “Sergeant, I believe not much can be done to resolve this case from the station. You know how it is—emergencies build up and are replaced by others. And missing persons merges runaways and adults who leave without warning with genuine criminal cases. Like me, you’re aware that they can’t cope. And the subject of Ruth Valldaura is already old news … it’s been six months since she disappeared.”
This—both were aware—was the worst thing of all. When it came to disappearances the first hours were critical, and in the case under discussion the alarm had been raised too late. The lack of clues made them think homicide, although Savall had used the absence of a body and the special circumstances surrounding this disappearance to assign the case to Bellver and his team.
Leire had the feeling her words weren’t falling on deaf ears. Martina Andreu’s expression softened. Just a little, enough that she, who knew her well, could gather new strength.
“On the other hand, we don’t lose anything if I spend part of my time on the case. I don’t want to do it without your permission,” she lied with the audacity of someone sure that she was right.
What was certain was that she needed information, to see what stage the file had reached, and concrete facts, to know if there was anything new since the case had been officially taken out of Salgado’s hands in a stormy conversation with Superintendent Savall, after which everyone had feared that Héctor Salgado would resign from the corps.
“Inspector Salgado did as much as he could, but, let’s not kid ourselves, the superintendent was right in one thing: Héctor was, still is, too involved in the case to be objective. And Bellver—”
“Don’t go there,” Martina Andreu interrupted her. “As you’ve said, Bellver and his people are overburdened with work. Like everyone.”
“Exactly,” insisted Leire. She’d perceived a shift in her superior’s tone, so she was careful not to lose ground already conquered. “It would be six weeks, maybe less. If the baby comes early, it’s over. But I believe I can cast a fresh pair of eyes on the case. I didn’t know Ruth Valldaura. While we were investigating I always had the impression that, given the victim’s identity, everyone took a series of things for granted. And Inspector Salgado couldn’t see it either, however much he wanted to.”
“I know.”
Leire smiled. She sensed that she was about to win the game.
“Listen,” Martina went on. “I don’t know what this will come to, or why you’re getting me into this mess. However, I know you well enough to understand that you’ll do whatever you feel like, with or without my approval. No, Leire, don’t lie to me. You came to me because I can facilitate certain things for you, not because you plan to listen to me if I forbid it. At the end of the day, it’s your free time and you can use it as you wish.”
“If you say no, I’ll abandon the matter. I don’t want to get you in any trouble, and I promise if I discover anything, I’ll inform you directly. You can decide how to proceed with Bellver from there.”
Agent Castro knew she was treading on dangerous ground. The sergeant’s ill-will toward Bellver had been public since he snatched the role of inspector from her with merits more personal than professional. But Leire suspected that the most insignificant allusion to the affair would make Martina Andreu dig in her heels.
“Fine. Come and pick me up at seven, at the end of my shift, and you’ll have a copy of the file. Oh, and not a word to Inspector Salgado if you come across him.”
It was unlikely, and the sergeant knew it: Savall had summoned him to his office, along with others, to discuss something with a National Police guy, some Calderón. After only half an hour, it looked as if it would go on for a while.
“Leire, if you want to work during leave, the same rules apply as if you were on duty, so, for your own good, I want to be kept informed. Keep me up to date on every move and every detail. Don’t do anything off your own back or I assure you when you return your life here will be very difficult. Is that clear?”
The grateful look that Leire Castro gave her convinced the sergeant for a moment that she wasn’t doing anything wrong. As the agent had said herself, they lost nothing by trying and, deep down, Martina was almost sure that the Ruth Valldaura case was doomed never to be resolved. At the same time, and not without a certain professional envy, she was sure that if there was anyone in that station capable of tackling an apparently unsolvable mystery, that person was Agent Castro.
4
So, that same night, file already in hand, Leire did what her mind and body were crying out for. She need
ed activity, a focus, and the file she had in front of her, although mostly familiar, represented a challenge that, among other things, made her feel alive. And useful. With a discipline she’d learned to appreciate, she read it slowly, as if she were facing it for the first time, convinced that on occasion the most insignificant details could culminate in the answer.
Then, after a good while of intense concentration, she did something that had helped her internalize things since she was small. Sitting at the dining-room table, she wrote down the most relevant details. It was a somewhat tiresome task now that practically nothing was written by hand, but Leire was aware that this forced her to slow down. She didn’t follow a precise order, but rather allowed her hand to outline what for her was a first approximation of the facts.
Ruth Valldaura Martorell. 39. Designer/illustrator of considerable success due to a line of home accessories very popular recently. Separated and mother of one son, Guillermo, who lived with her. Disappeared from her home, a loft-type apartment she also used as her studio, located on Llull, on July 7, 2010, although it wasn’t reported until two days later. There were no signs of violence in her home and the door hadn’t been forced. According to her partner, Carolina Mestre, a suitcase and four garments were missing, which tallied with the last she knew of Ruth, who had declared her intention of going away to spend the weekend at the apartment owned by her parents, which they still own, in the coastal area of Sitges. Her car was found parked close to her home, which led us to believe that probably its owner had never come to take it on the morning of July 7, when she told her parents, her ex-husband and her new partner that she wouldn’t be back until Sunday night. Her messages had been succinct. Seemingly, Ruth wanted to spend a couple of days alone near the beach.