by Antonio Hill
She was about to leave, feeling like a hypocritical intruder, but, crossing the dining room again she made out a flicker on the television. Héctor had left it on. No—it wasn’t the television. It was the DVD screensaver that was moving. If Salgado hadn’t mentioned the recordings to her, it would never have occurred to her to press the play button.
When the first few images hit the screen, she was overcome by an instinctive, visceral repulsion and a suspicion that now there was no going back. Despite herself, she had to watch the recording twice more to take it all in. Luckily it wasn’t very long, lasting only a few minutes, but within that time one could clearly see the bruised face of an old black man bleeding profusely, on the verge of slipping into unconsciousness. His parched lips could barely emit a slight moan and his eyes didn’t succeed in focusing on whoever was being forced to record his agony. On the blurry screen, Dr. Omar tried to open his eyes for the last time, but the effort was too much for his battered body. Martina Andreu heard his last breath clearly and witnessed death overcoming his face. The recording ended there, giving way to a dark gray cloud. And then, with the coldness that comes with years of service, the sergeant knew what the next step was. The separate pieces came together to form an unpleasant but logical whole. The witness statements, Omar’s disappearance, that horrendous film—and yes, the stench on the stairwell—fell magically into place and showed her the road to follow.
Taking the next step, however, wasn’t easy. She had to call it in, but first she wanted to be sure. It took her an eternity to leave Héctor’s flat. She descended a flight of stairs to the second floor, walking with the rigidity of an automaton. Carmen’s keyring had all the keys and she had to try a couple before finding the right one. The stench hit her full-blast on simply pushing the door open. She felt her way forward, as the flat wasn’t connected to the electricity mains. She followed her nose until she came to a small room in which she thought she could make out a little window. When she raised the blind, light invaded the space. Although she knew what she’d come looking for, the sight of Omar’s body made her jump backward. And she ran, ran to the front door, went through it and leaned against the door frame, eyes squeezed shut, blocking the space as if someone were pursuing her. As if the soul of that dead body could abandon its casing of flesh and seek to possess her. Seconds, maybe minutes had to pass before she was calm, before she was sure he was inside and couldn’t hurt her. Finally she managed to open her eyes, and she suppressed a scream of surprise and fear on seeing before her, with a serious expression, the friend she now feared with all her heart.
There’s nothing less bearable than waiting for a phone call with nothing to do. Agent Castro had many virtues, but patience wasn’t one of them. So, after forty minutes of chatting to María, during which she never stopped checking her mobile, she reluctantly decided to take the initiative and contact Inspector Salgado. The only response was his voicemail, offering as usual the opportunity to leave a message after the tone. She hesitated before doing so, but finally opted to cover her back and inform him of her plans.
“Inspector, Castro here. I’ve been waiting for your call and it’s after seven. With your permission, I’m going ahead on the Rubén Ramos thing. If you have anything to say to me, call me.”
She didn’t know if that was what Salgado would want, but that day Leire Castro wasn’t inclined to take the feelings of the other sex into consideration. Because of that, and although she knew she was taking a risk, she looked in her notes for Rubén’s number and dialled. A young voice answered with an insecure “Yes?” She took on a similar, slightly nervous tone as she explained to her listener that Aleix had given her his number, tonight was her birthday and she wanted to celebrate in style with her boyfriend. Yes, one would do, she assured him, trying to sound like the silly girl from a good family who could be a customer of Aleix’s. They agreed a time and place for the meeting without saying anything else, and she signed off with a quick “See you later.”
When she hung up, Leire asked herself if what she’d just done would make things awkward with the inspector, and, just in case, she rang him again. Sick of the neverending voice, she hung up without leaving a message.
33
Martina didn’t move even a millimetre from the door. She looked intently at Salgado, trying to read her colleague’s mind through his eyes. She didn’t succeed, but this gaze did at least manage to alleviate the panic that had overwhelmed her minutes before.
“Don’t come any closer, Héctor,” she warned him, in a firm, neutral voice. “This is a crime scene. You can’t go in.”
He obediently took a step back on the landing. With the door open, the stench from inside the flat was spilling out on to the landing, completely undiluted.
“What did you find in there?”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“Omar’s in there, Héctor. Dead. Beaten to death.”
Héctor Salgado had learned to keep calm in tense situations, to control his emotions so they didn’t surface on his face. They remained face to face for a few seconds, like two expectant duellists, while she tried to work out what she should do next. She had a murder suspect before her: someone who’d been seen with the victim the afternoon he disappeared, someone who had a score to settle with the dead man lying inside, in whose home there was evidence linking him to the case. And above all, someone who lived in the flat above the place she’d just found the body. She knew there was only one option. If he were in her place, Salgado would do exactly the same.
“Héctor, I have to arrest you on suspicion of the murder of Dr. Omar. Don’t make it any more difficult for me, please.”
“Are you going to cuff me?”
“I hope I won’t need to.”
“Does it make any difference if I tell you I had nothing to do with it?”
“At this moment in time, no.”
“Yeah.” He hung his head, like someone accepting the inevitable. The gesture made the sergeant take a step toward him.
“I’m sure it will all be cleared up, but right now it’s best for you to come with me. For your own good.”
He nodded slowly; then he lifted his head and the sergeant was shocked to see a smile on his face.
“You know what? The only thing I care about right now is that Carmen is going to be all right. That old lady is tougher than you and I put together!”
“You’re very fond of her, aren’t you?”
Héctor didn’t answer. There was no need. And that peaceful expression, more grateful than afraid, made the two Martinas struggling within the sergeant suddenly establish a truce, a non-aggression pact.
“Héctor, I’m the only one who has seen the body.” She silenced the start of a protest. “Shut up and listen for once in your life! Nothing can be done for Omar, so it’s all the same if I find him today or tomorrow.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“That I can take a few hours to investigate this case without any pressure. Not even from you.”
He still didn’t fully understand.
“Give me the keys to your house and get out of here. Disappear for a few hours until I call you. And promise me two things: first, that you won’t come near here or Omar’s flat under any circumstances.”
“And second?”
“Second, you turn up at the station as soon as I ask you to. No questions.”
Very slowly, he took the keys from his pocket and passed them to the sergeant. She snatched them roughly.
“Now get out of here.”
“Are you sure about this?” asked Héctor.
“No. But I am sure that as soon as I call in the discovery of the body the entire investigation will centre on you, Inspector Salgado. And no one, not me, not anyone, will be able to prevent it.”
He began to go down the stairs, but turned around mid-flight.
“Martina . . . Thanks.”
“I hope I won’t live to regret it.”
Héctor went out
into the street and began to walk toward the seafront where he usually went running. He walked slowly, not looking at anyone, carried by inertia. A while later, sitting in front of the twinkling Agbar Tower, that blue-and-red monolith that seemed to have been plucked from a Tokyo street, he realized he had nowhere to go. He felt like an accidental tourist, a poor Buenos Aires imitation of Bill Murray who didn’t even have the excuse of being “Lost in Translation.” No, he was alone in the city where he’d lived for nearly twenty years. He took out his mobile, an act as instinctive as it was useless: what the fuck was the point of it if he had no one to call? To make him even more fucked, he thought, smiling bitterly. He was checking his missed calls when it rang again, curbing that incipient melancholy for an instant. It wasn’t Scarlett Johansson, of course, but an excited and satisfied Leire Castro.
Hours before, Leire had parked the car she’d borrowed from the station on the kerb in an unloading bay, ten minutes before the time fixed for the meeting with Rubén. It was one of the unofficial cars, of course, those the Mossos used for trips when they didn’t want to attract attention. Nervous, she waited to see the boy in the photo appear, and once more she told herself she’d have been much more calm if someone, Salgado for example, had been ready as they’d planned, ready to intervene if things got ugly. She exhaled slowly: it was no big deal. She was only going to arrest a small-time dealer, to ensure his cooperation in putting pressure on the Rovira brat. And she could do that alone, fuck it.
She saw him arrive, on foot, his hands in his pockets and with the slick air of a third-rate delinquent. She was a little calmer. Leire considered herself a good judge of faces and this kid, barely twenty years old, didn’t seem particularly dangerous. She didn’t want to have to use her weapon, even to threaten him. He stood at the corner of Diputació and Balmes, and took a quick look around him. She flashed her lights, as if she were waiting for him. Rubén approached the car and, obeying the driver’s gesture to get in, he opened the door and sat in the passenger’s seat.
“I wasn’t sure if it was you,” she murmured in an apologetic tone.
“Yeah. Got the dough?”
She nodded and, while she pretended to search in her bag, she activated the car’s central locking. The kid gave a start which became a sigh of annoyance when Leire showed him her badge.
“Shit. I fucked up.”
“Only a tiny bit. Nothing serious.” She paused briefly, then started the car without taking her eyes off her new companion. “Calm down, kid. And put on your seatbelt. We’re going to go for a spin and chat for a while.”
He obeyed with a bad grace and hissed something between his teeth.
“Something you want to say?”
“I said chatting takes two . . .”
She laughed briefly.
“Well then, I talk and you listen. And if at the end you think it suits you to tell me anything, you do.”
“And if not?”
She put the car in reverse and moved off.
“If not, I’ll start up the monologue again to see if I can convince you. We girls are very tiresome, you know that. We like to hear ourselves talk.”
Rubén nodded and looked away indifferently toward the window. She’d already joined the sliproad, relatively empty of cars this July Saturday.
“I want to talk to you about a friend of yours, pretty posh of course. You know who I’m referring to, don’t you?”
Since there was no reaction from her companion, Leire continued her monologue without pausing, certain that he was listening to her attentively even though he pretended otherwise. When she mentioned the word “killer” he was tempted to turn toward her but resisted the impulse. However, as soon as she brought up Aleix’s family’s money, their contacts and the good lawyers they could hire to get their prodigal son out of this predicament—money, contacts and lawyers that he, a poor local fall guy, could only imagine—his survival instinct outweighed any other and Rubén told her what he knew and thought he’d seen on the eve of San Juan.
After making him promise to turn up at the station on Monday at the time she said, Leire let him go. She was sure the boy would keep his end of the deal. Then, for the third time that day, she grabbed her mobile and called Inspector Salgado.
34
When the old clock in her grandmother’s flat struck nine with the spirit of a chamber quartet, Joana realized she had been in front of the computer for hours, immersed in Marc’s texts and photos. She’d read them again and again, she’d looked at the photos, she’d seen him alive, drunk, smiling, playing the fool, serious, or simply caught by surprise with an absurd expression. He was a stranger to her, and yet in some spontaneous gestures she clearly saw young Enric, he who cared about nothing and lived to party, he who rejected his family’s ideals of effort and work. He who had won her over. And she understood with a mixture of relief and disappointment that the boy in the photos had maybe missed a mother figure when he was a child, but never her. Not Joana, with her faults, obsessions and virtues. In these photos, this boy was happy. Unconsciously happy. Happy as you can only be at nineteen, away from home and with the future stretching before your eyes as an unending succession of exciting moments. Maybe she was partly to blame for all that had happened to him, even the cursed chain of events that ended up throwing him out the window, but no more than Enric, no more than Fèlix, no more than these friends she didn’t know, no more than this Iris. Everyone had played their part, more or less honorable, more or less dignified. Thinking that she, a stranger after all, could claim a prominent role in Marc’s death was a sign of arrogance.
Night was falling, and she had to light the small table lamp, which blinked a couple of times, then went out completely. With a gesture of annoyance she rose to turn on the overhead light. It was a weak light which created a yellow, sad glow. Suddenly, she saw herself standing in that solitary, inherited flat, immersing herself in a past that she had left behind years before. She’d given up a lot then, but she’d managed to create a new life for herself since. Maybe not the one of her dreams, just one in which she could move without feeling trapped. And now, for the past few weeks, she’d fallen once again into a type of ridiculous self-imposed prison, that of a gray and defeated woman. Slowly, but without hesitation, she began to pack her bags. She didn’t plan on leaving until she’d seen this Iris and listened to what she had to tell her; then she would do what she had to do. Return to Paris, pick up her here and now, perhaps more imperfect than before, but at least hers. She’d earned it. As she folded her clothes, she wondered if Enric would be reading that same blog. She’d called him in the morning to tell him about it, but he hadn’t picked up the phone. She had left the message on his voicemail.
Enric started on hearing the creak of the study door. “Did I frighten you?”
“No.” At that moment he didn’t feel like speaking to Glòria
at all, but he forced himself to ask: “Is Natàlia in bed?”
“Yes.” She came over to the table. “She was waiting for you for a while, but in the end she fell asleep.”
Enric noticed the hint of reproach, so typical of his wife, who never complained directly. He usually pretended he hadn’t picked up on it, but that night, after two hours in front of the screen looking at photos of his dead son, the words came out of his mouth without him doing anything to stop them.
“I’m sorry. I’m not in the mood for stories tonight. Can you understand that?”
Glòria looked away. She didn’t answer. It was typical of her: never argue, look at him with that sort of condescending calm.
“You understand, don’t you?” he insisted.
“I only came to ask you if you wanted dinner.”
“Dinner?” The question seemed so trivial, so absurdly domestic, that he almost started laughing. “No. Don’t worry. I’m not hungry.”
“In that case I’ll leave you alone. Good night.”
Glòria went to the door without making a sound. Sometimes Enric thought he was married to
a ghost, someone who could move without touching the ground. In fact, he thought his wife had already left when her serene voice, always in a tone lower than average, reached him.
“Unfortunately Marc is dead, Enric. You can’t do anything for him. But Natàlia is alive. And she needs you.”
She didn’t wait for him to respond. She closed the door softly and left him deep in his helplessness, in a sea of worrying questions brought up by this blog of which he hadn’t been aware until this evening. But the brief and thought-out appearance of Glòria had the virtue of adding another cross for him to bear. Another thing that was his fault. Because if there was anyone in this world who knew him, anyone who could read his mind with absolute clarity, that person was Glòria. And just as if he said it in words, his wife knew that he couldn’t feel anything more than affection for the little girl she adored. However much he tried to hide it, however much she tried not to notice, however much Natàlia called him “Daddy” and put her arms around his neck. He’d had only one child, and that child had died, almost certainly at the hands of the girl who’d been his best friend.
Seconds later, with a clenched fist and tense jaw, he picked up the telephone and called his brother. No one answered.
Fèlix contemplated the telephone. It rang urgently, as insistent and inconsiderate as the person calling him. That night he, who’d always mustered patience before Enric’s selfishness, hadn’t the least intention of picking up. He knew what he wanted to ask him. Who was this Iris? What was the point of this macabre tale? Enric didn’t remember anything, of course. Another father would, but not Enric. At most, he might vaguely remember that the camps finished early that summer due to an accident. Although, to tell the truth, he hadn’t given him many details either. However, he had observed his nephew closely. But Marc hadn’t suffered nightmares; in fact, as soon as he returned home, to his regular routine, he’d seemed to forget about Iris. Yes. Everyone had pretended to forget about Iris. It was best.