Marc didn’t know how to take that statement, but he wanted to find out straight away, and decided to delve deeper into the topic.
“Surely, I must seem like an unusual type of guy to you, and you probably don’t know many like me. But I have to tell you that I like cars, the gym, and... women,” he wanted to stress that last word, pausing briefly before enunciating it. “And not necessarily in that order,” he concluded.
“Well I like literature, motorbikes and men,” replied the woman immediately. “I don’t know what mental image you’ve created of me, but I don’t think we’re all that different,” she added in a provocative tone.
A look of satisfaction suddenly appeared on Marc’s face. A satisfaction that the woman planned only on feeding:
“I bet that we can share many things together, and have an extraordinarily good time doing so,” she proceeded with her exposition. “But to do so, I think that above all it is imperative that you change that tyre first.”
The gym can wait. Miguel and his crazy sermons, even more, thought Marc in that instant. He tensed his trained muscles and set to work once more, cranking the lever to the jack with extraordinary exuberance. The woman remained unmoved by his side, watching him with a mixture of curiosity and naivety, giving her an appearance that was simultaneously intriguing and sensual.
“You said that you like motorbikes, but if you’ll allow me, I’ll tell you that a car is always a car,” commented Marc whilst the car was being elevated. “More so, if it’s anything like this one. They don’t make cars like this anymore: two hundred horsepower, turbo-charged, four-wheel drive, zero to a hundred in under seven seconds. A machine,” he concluded, giving it an affectionate pat on the bonnet. “And the most important thing right now: with a real spare tyre, not the ridiculous little inflatable rubber rings they have now in the latest generation cars.”
The woman did not seem to be all that interested in all of the details that the young man was spouting, but even so, she knew how not to appear rude:
“I bet it’s very heavy and stable.”
“Yes, it’s stable. And heavy: fifteen hundred kilos, straight out of the factory,” the guy also knew that figure. “A few more, with the extras I’ve put on it,” he added, pointing towards the spoiler.
“It’s incredible how such a small device is capable of withstanding the car’s weight all by itself,” the woman commented, looking at the jack, and smiling for the first time that whole morning.
“Well it obviously does,” replied Marc. “It’s made from a highly resistant alloy.”
Once he had raised the jack up to halfway, the car was balanced and the flat tyre was completely elevated off the ground. He finished extracting the bolts along with the wheel, leaving the wheel rim exposed. The woman bent down for a moment:
“And is it normal for a car like this to be leaking liquid from underneath?” she asked, unable to avoid accompanying the question with a slightly mocking tone.
In contrast, Marc became serious upon hearing this.
“No, of course not.”
He bent down the same way that the woman had just done and indeed ascertained that there was a sizeable puddle underneath his car.
“I’ve just had it serviced. It’s impossible for it to have a fault,” he said, getting back up.
“In this world, nothing’s impossible.”
The young man bent back down by the side of the car, parallel to it, pushed the two wheels aside to clear his line of vision, and tried to find out the origin of the leak.
“Maybe the guy who let down your wheel could have also had time to cause a leak,” she said helpfully.
“I don’t think so. It’s not easy to get to the car’s underside from the outside. Most of all because it has lowered suspension, and a man’s arm can hardly fit underneath. Clearly, I can’t see where the leak’s coming from either.”
“Perhaps if you raise it a little more...” she said to him, pointing to the jack.
Marc thought that seemed like a good idea. He reached out towards the lever, and in a few short seconds he raised it as far as it would go. The car was now elevated incredibly high on the one side. The young man did not say anything. As soon he finished, he got down flat on the ground, perpendicular to the car, and slid lightly underneath, just like an expert mechanic would. He certainly would not be able to avoid calling for a crane, but he was not disposed to let that leak ruin his plan without knowing at least where it came from.
“Do you see anything?” asked the woman.
“No. How weird, the car’s dry. There aren’t any leaks.”
“Have a good look. I wouldn’t like to get into the car only to find myself stranded God knows where.”
A small laugh was audible from underneath the vehicle:
“Ah, but, does that mean then that you’ve already been thinking about getting in with me?” said Marc, still not emerging from underneath. “It’s a bit strange, we’re making intimate plans and I still don’t know you’re name.”
The woman remained silent. The young man did not then want to insist on what seemed to be a promising opportunity to put his foot in it. And finding out her name was not something that he would be losing any sleep over at that moment.
Once he had checked that there was no leak anywhere, Marc called an end to his mechanical inspection. He moved lightly underneath the vehicle, and supported his hands on the ground to make his way out, trying to see the woman. Once he could see her, still not completely out from underneath, he noticed that the woman was gripping the lever to the jack. Firmly, and with both hands.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
The woman continued in silence. She simply pulled decisively outwards, causing the jack to abruptly leave its position. The discontinued automobile; the Opel Calibra Turbo, of more than one and a half metric tonnes, fell down in its entirety onto Marc’s head. The wheel did not reach the ground. Alternatively, there was a brief, hollow sound, as if a ripe fruit had fallen onto the ground and burst from its own weight. Nothing scandalous, nothing that would make anybody suspect what had taken place there, with the exception of the small stream of blood that trickled out from underneath the car.
“Emma, my name is Emma. Even though I imagine that you’ve never bothered to find out,” she said, with a certain level of anger in her voice.
Then, she leaned on the roof of the car and looked from one end of the street to the other, immobile. There were three people on the pavement, approaching, although they were still a considerable distance away. A few cars passed behind her at high speed down the neighbouring street. She observed her surroundings for a few seconds: not a single vehicle stopped, nobody on the pavement changed their course. Better this way, she thought. It would have been shameful to convince Marc’s family that she was his partner. Shameful, and not very believable either. And, above all, that version of events would require her to scream at that moment. But that was not the case. So she remained silent, took the golf ball out of her bag and left it on the windscreen, taking care for it to remain balanced. Once she had done this, she scrubbed the soles of her shoes against the tarmac on the street, so as not to leave a trail of blood behind her when she walked, and looked back at the pavement. The three people were becoming dangerously close, and walking at a decent pace.
Emma didn’t appear to be in a hurry. She smoothed her hair back down again, this time not in a flirtatious way, took off her glasses, put them in her bag, and walked down the pavement on the side that was free of pedestrians. Somebody would find the body soon, but by that time she would be far away. Far away enough so as to not arouse suspicion.
15
Antón had gone down to eat something and Eva, alone in her office, looked at her clock: a little after eleven. That time of morning in which we never know if we should be focusing on the hours that have passed since breakfast, or those that are still left before midday. In any case, she still hadn’t had breakfast. When she was just about to leave to get somethin
g to eat, she received a fax from Vigo telling her that, for the moment, they were continuing with their investigations, and that they hoped to be able to send her the result during the course of the day. The fact that the investigation was delayed could be the prelude to good news.
During the first hour of the day, she had received the report from the fingerprint department regarding the ball on Sebas’ grinder. Curiously, they had found ten fingerprints, all from the same person, four of them very clear. The problem: they had already cross-examined them with all of the people on the police database, and the person to whom they belonged was not there. The thread of hope disintegrated to nothing, but it also confirmed one of her suspicions: the killer acted like a paid assassin, but it was an apparently normal person, without a criminal record. More difficult to catch, if that were the case. A regular criminal, for the most part, acts in accordance with some fairly defined patterns. An anonymous person, on the other hand, does not.
Eva thought that they could perhaps check the prints with those that would inevitably be present in Aurora’s apartment. For a moment, she got the impression that to a certain extent she was beginning to consider what, in any other case, would be simply a desperate attempt, at clutching at straws. Anyway, she would decide when they received the report from Vigo.
Antón was not late in coming back to the office. He came in from the street with a ham roll in his hand and his spirits revived by the coffee he had just drunk:
“Any new developments?” he asked, as he took the first mouthful of the little roll.
“No, none. I’m hoping some news from Vigo will cheer us up somewhat.”
“It’s a pain, the fingerprinting,” he said, now sitting down. “I was hoping that they would at least let us know who our mysterious murderer is.”
“Basically, it’s normal that she’s not registered on the database.”
Antón took another bite, got comfortable in his seat, and waited for Eva to explain. He knew her well enough to know that, after emitting a conclusion like that, she would elaborate with the corresponding explanation.
“Just think, if she had been registered, she would have taken care to clean the ball. We have to appreciate that, when she killed Sebas, they were both alone, and she wasn’t rushed. So if she gives us her prints, it’s because she knows perfectly well that we can’t advance the case with them.”
The logic seemed reasonable to Antón, but Eva wanted to add yet another shade of meaning:
“Or at least, not with the speed that we need to.”
“Will she kill again?” he asked, with an air of fatalism.
“Well: Monday night, Tuesday morning...”
At that moment, the telephone rang. Eva did not finish the sentence. She looked at the display, then at Antón, and answered without taking her eyes off her companion:
“Hello, this is Santiago.”
She listened attentively to what the person on the other end of the line was telling her, but her expressions spoke volumes. So much so that before she had even hung up, Antón had already got up from his seat. Eva said goodbye on the phone:
“We’re on our way.”
She grabbed her jacket and re-joined her companion, who was waiting for her by the door:
“I think you have your answer.”
The two of them climbed into Eva’s car. They drove at top speed across the Puente Nuevo, with the siren on, and continued ahead to the Avenida de Marín. It was not long before they could see a sizeable group of people gathered around a small, cordoned off area that was being guarded by a patrol officer. They parked to the side of it. Antón got out of the car first, followed by Eva. They stood next to the police tape, observing the scene: a souped up car, missing one of its front wheels, and two tyres lying in the street, just to the side of the vehicle. Underneath it, just over half of a man’s body was poking out, resting in a large puddle of blood, and badly covered up with a blanket. The jack that he must have been using at the time of the incident was resting up against the victim’s body. At the foot of the windshield was a golf ball.
The policeman guarding the body was chatting with Antón whilst his colleague, who was standing with his back to the scene, was monitoring the onlookers. The two men were extremely young. The first man, as soon as he had finished with Antón, approached Eva and spoke to her discreetly:
“In theory, it all looks like an accident. But we arrived, saw the golf ball, and called headquarters. I don’t know if that was the right thing to do,” he said, appearing to excuse himself. “Míguez gave us the order this morning that if we saw a golf ball at any incident, we were to let him know before doing anything.”
“Yes, that’s perfectly fine,” Eva reassured the young man whilst she continued to observe the scene.
“Neither me nor my partner have touched anything,” the young officer continued explaining, “and I don’t think these people have either. When we arrived here, they were all standing by the car, horrified, but I don’t think anyone actually touched the body.”
“Thank you, officer. But don’t go away just yet.”
She looked up towards the group of bystanders and focussed on the face of each one present. Then she turned her attention back to the scene.
“Well, he’s definitely dead,” she told Antón, after examining the body. “But I don’t think it’s been any longer than half an hour.”
Eva pointed towards the bloody footprints on the ground.
“Somebody got blood on their shoes,” she said, at the same time. “The sole, at the very least. They left these marks when they rubbed them against the tarmac to clean them off.
From where he was standing, Antón instinctively checked the onlookers’ shoes. At his side, Eva called for the attention of the two officers:
“Have either of you stepped in the blood,” she called out, without moving from where she was.
The two policemen shook their heads. Then she looked at the onlookers, and got the exact same reaction. She signalled for the first policeman to come over to her:
“Give the order for them to patrol the surrounding area, looking for a woman, thirty years old, small, slight build, and blood-stained shoes. Quickly now.”
The young man walked off, speaking on the radio. Eva turned back towards Antón:
“It has to have been a woman,” she said. “I don’t think we’re mistaken on that.”
She turned to look at the bystanders:
“Did any of you see anything?” she asked.
They all shook their heads.
“Does anybody know who this car belongs to? It’s not exactly your run-of-the-mill car, you must have seen it at some point before...”
One man raised his hand:
“I know whose car it is,” he said from behind the tape.
Eva signalled for him to step under the police tape and come closer. The man obeyed:
“Don’t step in the blood on the ground,” she told the man as he was making his way up to the car. “Do you think you’ll be able to identify the victim?”
“No question about it: it’s Marc,” he said, once he saw the trousers poking out from under the sheet.
The man was insistent, facing the inspector’s look of surprise:
“Honestly, without a shadow of a doubt, it’s him. He was a customer at my café. I suppose he’d only just left, because he was drinking a coffee there literally just this minute,” Eva listened with wrapt attention. “He was wearing these clothes, this is his car, and his legs are unmistakeable: Marc lifted weights everyday.”
“Was he seen with a woman in the café?”
“No. He was chatting with me at the bar as he drank his coffee. Just like any other day.”
“Had he met with a woman, or was there a woman in the café at that time? Try to remember, it’s important.”
“He was planning on going to the gym. And there were two women in the café. Well, having said that, there was mostly just one. She caught Marc’s attention, but that’s how he w
as anyway. He was always chasing after girls. Especially if they were quite young.”
“Was she a young girl?”
“No, no. That’s what struck me as odd. I mean, yes, the girl was good-looking, but she wasn’t exactly a little girl anymore,” he said with conviction.
“Did they leave the café together?”
“No way! She took absolutely no notice of him. She left before he did, and they didn’t say a word to each other. I think that that’s what attracted him to her. Although the truth is, the girl had an air about her; something between intellectual and interesting, and almost arrogant, I’d say, which made her very attractive.”
“Do you know if they saw each other afterwards?”
“I really don’t know.”
“Can you describe her physically for me?”
“Dark hair, late twenties, glasses which gave her a nice look.”
“That’s her,” Eva concluded, turning to Antón.
The inspector did not need any more information, but he insisted on providing further explanations in spite of the fact that Eva had already turned away from him:
“I think it was the first time she had come to my café, and she had breakfast there for two hours. She read all of the newspapers. Then she left, shortly after Marc arrived. She asked for a plastic bottle of mineral water and then left.”
Eva suddenly turned back round to him. Then she looked at the car. She ran right up to it, bent down, and slid a piece of newspaper underneath it. It came back soaking wet. She smelled it: water. She brought it up to her mouth: mineral water.
“Here you have the modus operandi,” she told Antón. “Water. Crude and simple, but perfectly valid. You let down a tyre, place some water under the car and, whilst he’s changing the wheel, you tell him about the liquid on the ground, you get him to go underneath the car to see where it’s coming from. Then, one good kick on the jack and you’re done,” she reasoned, convinced. “Right, now pay attention: search for bottles of mineral water in the bins. Recover the tyre; I want to know if it really has been punctured or just had the air let out of it. And take a formal statement from the waiter. But before you do any of that, inform the media about what’s happening, but don’t tell them too much: just the names of the three victims, the detail regarding the golf ball, and the murderer’s description, along with her method of operating.”
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