Death on a Galician Shore

by Villar, Domingo

  ‘I’m not, you just have to walk around the village. There are For Sale signs everywhere. Developers aren’t going to invest in more land when they’ve still got houses for sale.’

  ‘Right,’ said Caldas, who hadn’t noticed this. ‘Well, what then?’

  Estevez took his time before replying. ‘I think the most solid clue is the threat painted on the boat. Maybe that Captain Sousa has a relative … Do you think that’s possible?’

  Caldas nodded.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re so interested in my opinion when it’s almost the same as yours.’

  ‘Almost?’

  ‘Yes.’

  *

  They paid for their meal and walked back to the car. Estevez had left it parked on the jetty, near the yacht club. They saw a few new customers in the Refugio del Pescador, but the waiter was the same one who had served them in the morning.

  ‘Where are we going now?’

  Caldas looked at his watch. There were still more than two hours until Justo Castelo’s funeral.

  ‘Do you remember the cable tie around the dead man’s wrists?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I want you to go to all the shops and department stores where you might get ties like that. Both here and in neighbouring villages. See if you can find one like it.’

  Estevez nodded. ‘You’re not coming?’

  ‘No. I’ll tell you where to drop me. I’m going to see a friend.’

  Captains Courageous

  Lola was drying her hands on her apron as she opened the door and kissed him on both cheeks. She led him quickly through to the back of the house.

  ‘He’s in the garden,’ she said, holding Caldas’s arm. ‘He’ll be delighted to see you.’

  He couldn’t remember when he’d last walked down that hallway. It must have been twenty-five years ago, maybe more. The walls seemed lighter and the doors opening off it smaller, but he recognised the smell. It had endured intact in his memory and he could have distinguished it from a thousand others. The first whiff took him right back, to the days of his childhood, when this hallway was like a magic tunnel leading him to Manuel Trabazo.

  In those days, Caldas saw Trabazo as Manuel, the Portuguese fisherman played by Spencer Tracy in the film Captains Courageous. Tracy was dark-haired and stocky, not lean and grizzled like Trabazo, but to Caldas they were one and the same. He’d seen the film dozens of times: a little rich boy falls overboard from an ocean liner and is rescued by a fishing boat, where one of the crew, Manuel, teaches the spoilt brat to laugh and sing. Just as Trabazo had tried to teach him so many times.

  Caldas always cried in the scene where Manuel, smiling and speaking Portuguese so that the boy won’t understand, orders one of his shipmates to cut the rope trapping him, knowing that he will be dragged to the bottom of the sea with the fish. The young Leo was afraid that Trabazo would end up there too one day.

  *

  Trabazo lay in a hammock wearing knee-high boots, dark trousers and a thick woollen jacket. A fringe of white hair partly hid his weatherbeaten forehead and closed eyes.

  ‘Don’t disturb him,’ Caldas said to Lola. ‘I’ll come back another time.’

  ‘If he finds out that you were here and I didn’t wake him he won’t speak to me for a week,’ she said, adding in a whisper: ‘Speak up, he can’t hear too well.’

  Caldas nodded. Lola approached Trabazo and grasped his arm firmly, as she’d done to the inspector a moment earlier.

  ‘Manuel, look who’s here,’ she shouted.

  Trabazo opened one eye, then the other, and stood up with a smile that added yet more creases to his face.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned, Calditas. I knew you were around,’ he said, patting him gently on the cheeks. ‘I thought you’d forgotten your old friend.’

  ‘My father said he spoke to you this morning.’

  ‘Did he know you were here in Panxón?’

  ‘Didn’t he say anything?’

  ‘That old rascal,’ muttered Trabazo, still smiling. ‘He asks about trivia and doesn’t tell me the important stuff.’

  ‘So how did you know I was here?’

  Trabazo clicked his tongue mockingly.

  ‘When you’re a radio celebrity, you can’t expect to keep a low profile. You’re like a tuna in a shoal of sardines.’

  ‘Oh, come off it,’ replied the inspector laconically.

  Trabazo stepped back and peered at Caldas, looking him up and down. ‘Damn, Leo,’ he said at last, putting his arm around the inspector. ‘It’s good to see you again.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Caldas. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Retired, as you probably know,’ said Trabazo, heading towards the porch. ‘But I’m not complaining. Since leaving the hospital I’ve been able to spend time on my sculptures,’ he added, gesturing towards the carved stone figures on pedestals dotted around the garden. ‘I can also play a game of chess after lunch without having to rush off halfway through. Though a doctor never fully retires, as you can imagine. Are you here on your own?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’d heard you had a thug with you.’

  Caldas smiled. He was surprised how popular his assistant had become. ‘He’s acquired a bad reputation.’

  ‘And a hot temper,’ said Trabazo. ‘He almost knocked Camilo’s teeth out on the jetty.’

  Caldas sighed, cursing inwardly, but decided not to enquire further.

  ‘Do you still go fishing?’ he asked instead.

  ‘I go out every day and cast a line, unless it’s raining or the sea’s rough,’ Trabazo said proudly. ‘There’s no way I’m retiring from that.’

  He gestured for Caldas to sit in a wicker armchair and fetched a couple of small glasses and a bottle of coffee liqueur from a cabinet.

  ‘How is your father?’ he asked as he filled the glasses.

  ‘I thought you spoke to him this morning?’

  ‘As I said, he just calls about trivia,’ exclaimed Trabazo. ‘Today he wanted me to remind him of the name of a neighbour we used to play dominoes with. He didn’t say why. Apart from the fact that the man no longer lives here, he was a half-wit. When I told your father his name, he rang off.’

  So his father was still busy updating the Book of Idiots.

  ‘He’s got this notebook. He calls it the Book of Idiots.’

  ‘So he’s still making his crazy list?’ asked Trabazo, puzzled. ‘That was something from before your mother died.’

  Apparently, Caldas had been the last to know about the notebook. ‘I don’t think he’d done anything with it for a while,’ he said, as if excusing his father.

  Trabazo smiled again and raised the glass to his lips.

  ‘How long is it since we last saw each other – a couple of years?’

  ‘At least,’ said Caldas. ‘It was at the vineyard, wasn’t it?’

  Trabazo nodded. ‘How’s Alba?’

  ‘Not around,’ said Caldas, tersely.

  ‘Oh, dear. And your father?’

  ‘Uncle Alberto’s illness has hit him hard.’

  Caldas extracted his packet of cigarettes and held it out to Trabazo.

  ‘Want one?’

  ‘No thanks, I’m a retired smoker as well.’

  Caldas put a cigarette between his lips, held his lighter to it and inhaled deeply. ‘The other day, as we left the hospital, his eyes filled with tears. I’d never seen him cry before.’

  ‘That’s what happens to people with feelings,’ said Trabazo. ‘Their eyes fill with tears when they’re upset.’

  ‘Right,’ said Caldas quietly.

  ‘But don’t let it bother you too much, Leo,’ Trabazo added, seeing the face of his old friend’s son darken. ‘After a certain age we get more thick-skinned and things affect us less and less.’

  ‘Right,’ said the inspector again.

  ‘Why aren’t you drinking your liqueur? Your father says you’ve got first-rate taste.’

  ‘Don’t listen to him,’ Caldas
replied, taking a sip. ‘Do you make it yourself?’

  ‘No, a former patient sends me some every year,’ said Trabazo, taking another drink, leaving a thick, dark coating of liqueur up the side of the glass.

  ‘Well, it’s very good,’ Caldas assured him.

  Trabazo leaned back in the armchair and put his feet up on the table, beside the bottle. They remained like this, in silence, as they had when Caldas was a child and he spent the night there, seeking Manuel, the Portuguese fisherman, in Trabazo.

  The inspector’s cigarette had almost burned out when Manuel Trabazo asked: ‘You haven’t come just to see me, have you?’

  ‘No,’ Caldas admitted.

  The Trawler

  ‘El Rubio was a good lad. I expect you know he had a heroin problem.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But he got off it. He’d been clean for years.’

  ‘Completely?’

  ‘Completely,’ affirmed Trabazo. ‘You don’t lie to your doctor or your priest. Why are you looking into this, Leo? I thought it was suicide?’

  Caldas’s reply was typically Galician: ‘Did you see the body?’

  ‘Now that I’ve retired they don’t get me to certify deaths. Was there something strange?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Caldas, reluctant to reveal the details that made him sure Castelo had been murdered. ‘Though no one in the village seems surprised that he should have committed suicide.’

  ‘No, no one’s surprised and, to be honest, I’m not either. El Rubio was a good man, but he was an odd sort. A loner. Addicts sometimes develop depression years later, and he always seemed like a textbook case.’

  Caldas nodded.

  ‘The method he used was one people often choose around here,’ added Trabazo. ‘In these villages, the sea gives and takes everything.’

  ‘Right. Do you know if he got on badly with anyone?’

  Trabazo shook his head, his white fringe flopping over his forehead. ‘El Rubio never had anything to do with anyone. I never knew him to have either friends or enemies.’

  ‘But apparently he’d received threats.’

  ‘You mean the stuff painted on his boat?’

  ‘So you know about it?’

  ‘Everyone knows, Leo. But I’m not sure I’d call it a threat.’

  ‘Do you know what it said?’

  ‘A little,’ he admitted. ‘Didn’t it refer to a boat that sank years ago, the Xurelo?’

  The inspector gestured vaguely, indicating that this was more or less the case. ‘There was also the word “Murderers”,’ he added. ‘What do you make of that?’

  Trabazo shrugged.

  ‘And it happened on other occasions?’ asked Caldas.

  ‘It’s what I’ve heard around.’

  ‘Have you got any idea who might have done it?’

  ‘I don’t know, Leo. I suppose anyone could have. But it’s odd after so many years. Though I always had the feeling there was something strange about that shipwreck.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Nothing …’ said Trabazo. The inspector’s wicker armchair creaked as he leaned forward to hear what his old friend had to say. Years of interrogations had taught him that such a ‘nothing’ was invariably a prelude to a revelation. Like the retreating sea that warns that a huge wave is coming, when confidences began with the word ‘nothing’, Caldas knew it was the moment to pay attention.

  ‘It wasn’t a night for fishing. I never understood how they were caught out at sea by the storm or why they tried to return to Panxón rather than shelter in a port that was nearer.’

  ‘Were they fishing far from here?’

  ‘Quite a few miles north,’ said Trabazo, pointing towards the end of the garden. ‘By Salvora Island.’

  ‘Why did they go so far?’

  ‘On the Xurelo they fished with a cerquillo net. They went out for mackerel, sardine, horse mackerel, whatever was plentiful. But it’s many years since the ria has teemed with fish. The waters are empty now. To find big shoals you have to get away from the coast. Many boats head south, towards Portugal, but the Xurelo always went north. They’d spend a few nights fishing there, by the Arosa ria, before returning to port. They almost always came back with a full hold. Sousa had a good eye.’

  ‘What do you think could have happened?’

  ‘Only those who were there really know. But it’s very strange. Things can change suddenly at sea. A long wave can catch you unawares or the wind can get up unexpectedly,’ he said, waving his arms. ‘But we all had warning of the storm that night. The Xurelo had left Panxón two days earlier, and there’d already been a bad weather warning. There were four men on board. The crew – Valverde, Arias and El Rubio – were young. You know all this, don’t you?’

  Caldas nodded.

  ‘But the skipper of the Xurelo was a veteran. Older than me. His name was Antonio Sousa. He’d been at sea since he was in short trousers. He was an experienced skipper, he knew what he was doing. He wasn’t rash, Leo. He’d been tested by the sea before and he had plenty of respect for it. I don’t know how he could have been caught by surprise.’

  ‘Where did they go down?’

  ‘Right there, very near the island of Salvora. It foundered on rocks that anyone who’s fished in the area is familiar with, the kind that stick out at low tide. That, too, was odd with Sousa at the helm,’ he observed. ‘The fact is the boat went down. The boys managed to swim ashore in their life jackets, but Sousa didn’t make it.’

  ‘What did the three of them say?’

  ‘They were scared, too shocked to explain anything. At night and in heavy seas you can’t see further than the waves washing over the deck. All they could remember was the terrific noise as the hull was torn open by the rocks, and the cold of the water. The boat took less than a minute to sink. They weren’t far from the coast and they swam ashore guided by the light of a lighthouse. But it must have been horrendous.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Caldas, lighting a cigarette and placing the packet on the table.

  ‘Sousa’s body wasn’t found until several weeks later. The boat went down a few days before Christmas and it was well into January by the time the body turned up. You have no idea the effect it has on a fishing village when a boat is lost. People walk in silence and talk in whispers. All you hear are the church bells and the sea, reminding us of its power. The storm lasted several days and the lifeboats couldn’t go out. By the time divers got to examine the wreck, there was no sign of the skipper. We were all sure Sousa had drowned, but we were anxious to know if the sea would return the body to land or keep it for herself.’

  Caldas thought of Captains Courageous and the flowers the little boy throws into the sea at the end, hoping that they’ll reach Manuel the Portuguese fisherman in his underwater grave.

  ‘I don’t know if you know that lots of bodies have washed up on the beach where El Rubio was found – the Madorra,’ said Trabazo. ‘The current drags them ashore and they end up floating in the seaweed. Some are identified because there’s news of a boat going down, but for others all we know is the date they’re found. The people of the village have always buried them in the cemetery here. There’s a triangular area of lawn by the entrance with anonymous graves. The unidentified corpses washed up by the sea are buried there.’

  ‘But the Xurelo sank too far from Panxón for Sousa to have washed up on the same beach as Castelo,’ Caldas pointed out.

  ‘Yes, of course. Sousa’s body was found caught in the nets of a trawler from Vigo, after we’d given up all hope of finding him. It was well out to sea, several miles from the wreck.’

  ‘Did you attend the certification of the death?’

  ‘No, no. The body was taken to Vigo and I assume a pathologist there dealt with it. But I did try to help Sousa’s family. It was a long time ago but I still remember clearly the nights of waiting. After his wife hadn’t slept for a week, I had to sedate her so she could get some rest.’

  Caldas swa
llowed.

  ‘Who identified the body?’

  ‘His son,’ whispered Trabazo. ‘From the clothing. After almost a month in the water it was all he could identify.’

  ‘Right.’

  Caldas smoked, leaning back again in the wicker armchair, contemplating Trabazo’s sculptures. Then, as he stubbed out his cigarette, he asked: ‘What about Sousa’s crew? I understand they were close.’

  ‘Until the Xurelo went down, yes. But the loss of the boat tore them apart. Arias left to work on an oil rig in the North Sea a few weeks after it happened. El Rubio and Valverde stayed in the village, but never spoke again. It was as if something happened on that boat.’

  ‘Isn’t it enough that it sank?’

  Trabazo didn’t think so. ‘Fishermen who survive a shipwreck become like brothers. They’ve faced death and escaped. It’s a bond that can’t be broken, like the friendship between men who’ve shared a trench in a war. But after the Xurelo foundered they no longer had anything to do with one another. They wouldn’t even acknowledge each other in the street.’

  Caldas nodded.

  ‘It’s also usual for the survivors to talk about their experience,’ Trabazo went on. ‘After all, it could happen to anyone. But none of the three ever said a word about that night. Arias left for Scotland, El Rubio withdrew into his shell and Valverde never set foot in the harbour again. They say he was scared.’

  Caldas recalled that Castelo’s sister had also mentioned that her brother never fished out of sight of the coast because he was afraid.

  ‘Arias only came back to the village recently. Did they pick up their friendship?’

  ‘No,’ said Trabazo. ‘Even though they were both at the fish market every morning, Arias and El Rubio barely acknowledged each other. And I don’t think he had anything to do with Valverde either. Have you met them?’

  ‘I spoke to José Arias this morning,’ said Caldas. ‘I haven’t seen Marcos Valverde yet. I’ve been to his house but only his wife was there. Things don’t seem to have gone too badly for him.’

  ‘Valverde’s clever and hard-working. He got out of fishing and went into construction. He must have made a lot of money.’