Death on a Galician Shore

by Villar, Domingo

  ‘Look, Leo, if that’s how you’re going to be about it, no more music for you.’

  Caldas left the studio and, as he looked in on the control room to say goodbye to Rebeca and the technician, he switched his phone back on. He’d missed two calls. The first was from Guzman Barrio. The pathologist had agreed to phone as soon as he finished the autopsy on the drowned man. The second call was from his father.

  ‘See you Thursday,’ said Rebeca with a wave.

  Justo Castelo

  The rain was still pouring down when Caldas got back to the police station so he asked his assistant for a lift to the Town Hall. Estevez waited with the engine running while the inspector delivered the string of complaints gathered during the radio show to the City Police. Then they went to see the forensic pathologist.

  ‘Go and see if he’s in his office,’ said Caldas, checking his mobile again.

  Estevez peered round a door abruptly, then looked back to Caldas and shouted: ‘Yes, boss, he’s here!’

  ‘Bloody hell, Estevez,’ said a startled Guzman Barrio. He’d been slouching in an armchair, trying to catch up on his sleep. ‘Do you always burst in like that?’

  ‘No, he usually kicks the door down,’ said Caldas from behind his assistant. ‘You left me a message on my mobile.’

  ‘It’s about the man who was washed up this morning in Panxón,’ said the pathologist. ‘You know about it?’

  Caldas answered with a question: ‘Have you finished the examination?’

  The pathologist rose, stretching discreetly, and made his way towards the door past the two policemen.

  ‘If you’d like to see the body …’ he said, heading out into the corridor. ‘It’s just been stitched up, so it can be handed over to the family.’

  ‘Nice work,’ muttered Estevez.

  ‘Well, our customers don’t complain,’ said the pathologist.

  As always on these occasions, Estevez grumbled all the way to the swing doors of the autopsy room. He really didn’t want to see the drowned man again, especially now that he’d been cut open. Taking a deep breath, he followed the inspector and the pathologist inside.

  ‘Where’s the drowned man?’ Barrio asked two auxiliaries who were washing a female cadaver in preparation for an autopsy.

  ‘In the freezer, Doctor. Shall I bring it out?’ asked one of the auxiliaries.

  ‘No, that’s OK. You carry on with what you’re doing.’

  Barrio headed towards a large metal door and, pulling the handle firmly, entered the cold room. He came out a few seconds later pushing a trolley. On it lay a body in a grey plastic cover. Barrio took a pair of latex gloves from a box on a shelf, and also found some disposable masks, which he handed to the policemen.

  Having donned the gloves, the pathologist unzipped the body bag in a single motion and let it fall open, revealing the naked body of the fisherman.

  ‘Meet Justo Castelo,’ he said.

  ‘We’ve already met,’ said Estevez, hanging back. He had no intention of coming any closer.

  The stitched-up autopsy incision stood out like a zip against the corpse’s chalk-white skin. The Y-shaped wound started on either side of the neck, merged below the sternum and descended in a single line, circling the navel and ending just above the pubic bone.

  Though wearing a mask, Caldas recoiled at first from the smell. Then he looked at the corpse’s wrists. Only after examining the deep grooves left there by the plastic cable tie did he look at the head. A row of stitches circled the scalp like a crown.

  Justo Castelo’s forehead, cheeks and chin had suffered multiple blows. His eyelids were taped shut. The pressure of the water had burst the blood vessels of his nose and eyes. His lips were swollen and turned outwards, as if he’d greeted death with a kiss, lending the face a grotesque aspect.

  ‘He drowned,’ said Barrio solemnly.

  ‘Some sleuth,’ muttered Estevez from behind.

  Inspector Caldas turned to his assistant with a furious glance.

  ‘What?’ said Estevez defensively. ‘You don’t need a bloody autopsy to tell you that.’

  ‘I meant he was still alive when he entered the water,’ said Barrio. ‘That’s not always the case. The sea is a good place to dispose of a corpse.’

  ‘Right, right,’ Caldas interrupted and then, turning to his assistant, he said: ‘Why don’t you wait outside?’

  Estevez’s face lit up: ‘Sure,’ he said, tugging off the mask with a sigh of relief. ‘What with the young lady those two are cleaning up and our fair-haired friend here, I was starting to feel sick.’

  Dr Barrio waited for Estevez to leave the room before continuing:

  ‘As I was saying, there’s evidence of vital reactions. See the ecchymoses here?’ he said, indicating small red marks on the eyelids. ‘And when we got there, there was still foam exuding from his mouth and nose. So there’s no doubt he was still alive when he entered the water.’

  Caldas grimaced, imagining the dead man’s face with eyes wide open and foaming at the nose and mouth. Familiar with his assistant’s reaction to dead bodies, he wasn’t surprised at the effect this one had had on him.

  He examined the grooves on the dead man’s wrists. The pathologist told him what he already knew:

  ‘They were bound with a plastic tie.’

  ‘Estevez said you don’t think he tied his hands himself.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ confirmed the pathologist. ‘It was a cable tie – you fasten it by inserting one end into an eyelet in the other.’

  Apparently the only way to explain how these ties worked was by miming the action. Like Estevez at the Bar Puerto, Barrio put both hands together in the air and then tried to jerk them apart.

  ‘You know the kind I mean?’

  Caldas nodded.

  ‘And he couldn’t have fastened it himself?’

  ‘His palms were pressed together. How would he have fastened the tie?’ asked Barrio, indicating the indentations on the dead man’s wrists.

  Caldas brought his own hands together. ‘I suppose first I’d try to insert the end into the hole.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘With my fingers,’ Caldas said doubtfully. ‘No?’

  ‘Maybe,’ conceded Barrio. ‘And how would you tighten it?’

  ‘With my teeth?’

  ‘Exactly – with your teeth.’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ asked the inspector.

  ‘Would you mind putting your hands together again?’ the doctor asked.

  Caldas once again pressed his palms together.

  ‘How would you go about fastening a tie around your wrists using your teeth?’

  ‘Like this,’ said the inspector, raising his hands to his mouth.

  ‘But to do that the eyelet would have to be there, by your thumbs,’ said Barrio, indicating the part of the inspector’s wrists closest to his mouth. ‘Yet the tie binding this man’s hands was fastened around the other side, by his little fingers.’

  Caldas rotated his hands and held them up to his mouth as the pathologist had described.

  ‘You could do it like this, too,’ he said.

  Barrio disagreed: ‘You could tighten it like that, Leo, but it would be unnatural.’

  ‘But you could do it,’ insisted Caldas.

  ‘Maybe,’ said the doctor. ‘But it would be more or less impossible to insert the end of the tie into the eyelet using your little fingers. Almost as hard as threading a needle with them.’

  Caldas stared at his hands and nodded, separating them.

  ‘Couldn’t he have moved the fastener round after tightening the tie?’

  Barrio shook his head. ‘It was too tight, Leo. See the marks it’s left on the wrists? I’m sure it didn’t move at all. I had to cut it to release his hands,’ the doctor went on. ‘Clara Barcia has taken it away to examine it, but I doubt she’ll find anything useful after so many hours in the sea.’

  ‘Couldn’t he have got someone else to tighten it and then jumped into
the water?’ asked Caldas.

  ‘He could have …’ said Dr Barrio, but his expression showed doubt. In his experience, people who decided to end their lives by throwing themselves into the sea had access to too many ways of tying themselves up to choose one that required another’s help.

  ‘Right,’ said Caldas, then pointed to the dead man’s face: ‘What about these injuries?’

  ‘Most of them are post mortem. But there are two contusions that were inflicted while he was still alive. This is one of them,’ said the pathologist, showing Caldas a wound surrounded by a large bruise on the dead man’s right temple.

  ‘And the other one?’

  ‘Behind, on the occipital bone,’ said Barrio, lifting the corpse’s head to show Caldas the back.

  The inspector walked around the trolley to look more closely at the area.

  ‘The blow on the back of the head was severe enough to make him lose consciousness. It was caused by a long object, probably metal,’ explained the pathologist. ‘See?’

  Caldas was having trouble distinguishing this particular injury from all the others. ‘Sort of,’ he said.

  Barrio took a pen from the pocket of his white coat and went over to fetch a notebook from a shelf.

  ‘The contusion’s narrow at first, then thicker and rounder at the end,’ he explained, resting the notebook on the trolley and drawing the outline of the injury on a blank page. ‘It could have been made by the kind of spanner used for tightening wheel nuts, or any other object with a rounded end.’

  Barrio tore out the page and handed it to the inspector.

  ‘And the wound on the forehead?’ asked Caldas, folding the paper and tucking it in his back pocket.

  ‘That one has a very uneven shape. It could have been caused by a rock,’ said the pathologist. ‘I’d say he was struck with the bar from behind and the injury on the forehead happened when he fell forwards on to a rock. Then he was tied up and thrown into the sea. Though the blow on the temple could have been caused by the waves dashing him against rocks while he was still alive.’

  Caldas continued to stare at the wound, partly hidden by his fair hair, on Justo Castelo’s forehead.

  ‘That seems more likely than him falling on to a rock while he was on a boat,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Yes, it makes more sense.’

  ‘But there’s something I don’t quite understand,’ said the inspector. ‘If he was unconscious, there was no need to tie him up. Simply throwing him overboard would have been enough for him to drown.’

  ‘They wanted to make sure. Contact with the cold water might have brought him round, but no one can swim in the sea with their hands tied. In fact, there was foam in his bronchi, so he drowned trying to breathe in the water. Have you ever watched a fish die out of water, Leo?’

  ‘Once or twice,’ said Caldas. ‘So you think he was murdered?’

  ‘Don’t rule out other possibilities yet,’ said the doctor hastily. ‘If for some reason this man was on a boat with his hands tied, he could have lost his balance and hit his head on some part of the hull before falling into the sea. Maybe he was trying to escape. There’s no sign of the boat yet, is there?’

  There wasn’t.

  ‘Do you really think it could have been an accident?’

  ‘No,’ said Barrio, before adding: ‘But I can’t rule it out.’

  Caldas moved closer to take another look at the fisherman’s hands, the wounds on his wrists and the skin of his palms corrugated by sea water. Barrio might not rule it out, but the possibility of Justo Castelo’s death being an accident was too remote. Caldas didn’t need to wait for the boat to turn up to know that he was dealing with murder. He noticed the man’s elbows. They were marked in a way he couldn’t identify so he asked the pathologist about them.

  ‘The elbows, shoulders and knees are our fault,’ admitted Dr Barrio with a rueful smile. ‘He was so stiff we had to coax him on to the stretcher with a hammer.’

  ‘I’m not surprised he’s got gooseflesh,’ said Caldas, remembering that his assistant had been struck by how cold the body was. ‘He was icy’, Estevez had said.

  ‘Do you know the exact time of death?’

  ‘For a drowned man, Leo?’ said Barrio, spreading his arms. ‘He’d been in the water over eighteen hours, I can state that definitely. A day, maybe two …’

  ‘Estevez remarked that the body was very cold.’

  ‘It wasn’t particularly,’ said Barrio, shaking his head. ‘It was soaked with sea water, of course, so perhaps that’s why the skin felt so cold to him.’

  ‘Right.’

  Superintendent Soto always said that the bodies of the drowned were the only ones that could bamboozle pathologists. Caldas was learning the truth of this.

  ‘When was he last seen alive?’ Barrio asked.

  ‘Seems like it was Sunday morning, in his boat in the harbour.’

  ‘Well, there you have it: a day,’ concluded the doctor. ‘Can I cover him up now?’

  ‘If there’s nothing else.’

  ‘Nothing you can see with the naked eye,’ said the pathologist, starting to zip up the grey plastic body bag.

  ‘And the stuff you can’t see?’

  ‘When he was searched, a sachet of white powder was found in one of his pockets.’

  ‘Cocaine?’

  ‘That’s what I thought but it just tasted like salt. Maybe the sea water had tainted it,’ he said. ‘We’ve sent it off to the lab, together with a blood sample. I’ll let you know as soon as I get the results back.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  The pathologist shook his head.

  ‘Clara Barcia has got the full list of his clothes and personal effects, but there was nothing noteworthy. Apart from the sachet, I think all he had on him was a bit of money, keys and a figa.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A figa,’ repeated Barrio. He clenched his fist with his thumb protruding between his index and middle fingers, and held it up. ‘Haven’t you ever seen one?’ he asked. ‘It’s a kind of amulet.’

  ‘Of course I have,’ said Caldas, clenching his own fist in the same way. ‘I just didn’t know that’s what they were called.’

  Shadows

  The shirt, sweater and corduroy trousers that Justo Castelo had been wearing when he was pulled out of the water sat carefully folded on a metal table at the Visual Inspection Unit. Beside them lay a navy-blue waterproof jacket, together with his socks and underpants.

  On the floor, Caldas saw a pair of rubber boots, similar to those his father had been wearing when he had emerged from the rows of vines preceded by the brown dog that accompanied him everywhere. The inspector looked down at his shoes. He’d wiped them with a paper towel when he got to the office, but they retained traces of the sandy soil from the riverbank where they’d walked that morning.

  The inspector was still thinking about his father as Clara Barcia showed them each item of clothing and confirmed that nothing relevant had been found on the beach. He was still sorry he’d got out of the car so abruptly, and suddenly remembered that his father had called during the radio show. He looked at his watch. By now his father would have visited Uncle Alberto in hospital and left the city, returning to the sanctuary of his vines. Caldas pictured him sitting at the table, as he had been the night before, looking through his notebook, warmed by the fire and Maria’s soup. He promised himself he’d call as soon as he had a moment.

  Barcia brought over a tray. On it lay several transparent bags containing the items found in the drowned man’s clothing. One contained some banknotes that had almost disintegrated in the water, another two keys on a simple metal ring, and a gold chain and medallion. In the third was the little fist with the thumb protruding between the fingers. It was made of a dark metal, and about the size of a grape.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Estevez.

  ‘A figa,’ said Barcia. ‘They were supposed to ward off the evil eye and spells. They protected you against bad luck.’

/>   ‘Well, a lot of good it did him,’ muttered Estevez.

  ‘No, it didn’t protect him. But nowadays they’re not worn for that, they’re just jewellery,’ said Barcia. She then repeated what the pathologist had already told the inspector: ‘There was also a little plastic sachet containing a white substance. We’ve sent it off for tests. I expect Dr Barrio mentioned it.’

  Caldas confirmed that he had.

  ‘What about the cable tie?’ he asked.

  Barcia went to a shelf and returned with another transparent bag.

  ‘It had to be cut off, to free the wrists,’ she said, placing the sachet containing the tie, which had been cut in half, on the table.

  The policemen leaned over to look at it more closely.

  ‘It’s green,’ said Estevez.

  Caldas saw he was right: the smooth side of the tie was green plastic. He didn’t need to ask what the dark stains on the other, toothed side – the side that had been in contact with the skin – were.

  ‘Is that unusual?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re usually white or black, aren’t they?’ said Estevez.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Barcia. ‘The problem is I can’t see any marks from which to identify the manufacturer.’

  ‘I bet it was made in China,’ said Estevez. ‘Everything’s made in China these days.’

  ‘Quite possibly,’ said Barcia. She indicated one of the dark stains like shadows in the indentations of the toothed side of the cable tie. ‘We’re going to get this tested as well, just in case. Though I’m sure all we’ll find is blood and skin remains.’

  Caldas was glad Barcia was working on the case. She had initiative and was extremely meticulous. She noticed things other people missed.

  She indicated the bag containing the keys and medallion. ‘He was wearing the chain around his neck. The medallion is of the Virgin of El Carmen, the patron saint of fishermen.’

  Caldas nodded.

  ‘The larger key looks like a front-door key,’ Barcia continued, handing the bag to the inspector. ‘The smaller one could be for a cupboard, a garage, a junk room …’