Death on a Galician Shore

by Villar, Domingo

  ‘Try to see it from that angle,’ the inspector continued. ‘We’ve got a depressive fisherman who puts out to sea on a rest day. He sails first thing in the morning, so he doesn’t bump into any neighbours and have to answer awkward questions. A few hours later his body washes up on the beach, hands tied like lots of other suicides. Why would the police look into the death? It’s a textbook suicide. If the cable tie had been fastened round by his thumbs rather than his little fingers, that’s what we would have thought, too. We’d have asked around and everyone would have confirmed that Castelo was a strange loner. The lucky charms would have pointed to someone who was superstitious. There would have been no investigation, Rafa. I’m sure of it. El Rubio would have been buried, prayers said, and that’s that.’

  ‘What about the blow to the head?’

  ‘Barrio only paid attention to it because the cable tie had alerted him. Otherwise he’d have attributed it to the fall. It was just one more injury, one of many.’

  Estevez looked sceptical. ‘That all makes sense,’ he said, ‘but it still doesn’t explain why they threw the spanner on to the rocks.’

  ‘Don’t you see, it didn’t matter where the spanner ended up if nobody was going to be looking for it. Castelo’s body washed up on the Madorra. Where was the spanner? One, two kilometres away. Who would have made the connection? If nobody knew he’d been hit on the head, what did it matter if someone found the object he’d been hit with?’

  ‘I agree, but why get rid of the weapon on the shore if it was just as easy to chuck it out at sea?’

  Caldas shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘At seven in the morning it’s still pretty dark. Maybe they threw the spanner into the darkness on their way to the lighthouse. As I say, they thought the death would look like suicide, so they didn’t care if anyone found it.’

  ‘You’re sure there were several of them?’

  ‘There had to be more than one,’ replied Caldas. ‘Do you remember Hermida’s wife saying that Castelo was alone on his boat when he left port?’

  Estevez nodded.

  ‘In which case they could only have approached him by sea,’ said Caldas, pushing the pack of cigarettes across his desk as if it were the fisherman’s boat. ‘One person on his own would have had to leave his own boat adrift while he took Castelo’s to the lighthouse. That’s why there had to be at least two of them.’

  ‘He could have towed it.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Trabazo claims it would be impossible to get past the rock barrier towing a boat like El Rubio’s. Anyway one person on his own would have had trouble subduing him in such a small space,’ Caldas added, toying with the cigarette packet, increasingly confident of his argument. ‘And remember that the blow that knocked him unconscious was to the back of the head. Someone probably distracted him while someone else came up behind him and whacked him with the spanner.’

  ‘That’s if we can confirm that he was hit with the spanner.’

  ‘I’m right, you’ll see,’ said Caldas.

  He picked up his office phone, dialled Dr Barrio’s number and switched to speakerphone so that Estevez could hear.

  ‘How did you get on with the spanner, Guzmán?’ Caldas asked, after exchanging greetings.

  ‘I’m still working on it.’

  ‘You can’t give me anything now?’

  ‘It could be the murder weapon, Leo,’ said Dr Barrio. ‘The shape’s right.’

  ‘Any prints?’

  ‘It’s been in contact with sea water,’ replied the pathologist. ‘It’s clean.’

  ‘Do you know how long it’s been underwater?’

  ‘When was the fisherman killed?’

  ‘Sunday.’

  ‘That’s five days, isn’t it?’ said the pathologist. ‘It could be, yes. The steel hasn’t begun to rust yet.’

  When he rang off, Caldas tapped the desk with his cigarettes. ‘There you are: confirmed.’

  ‘Confirmed?’ asked Estevez, astonished. ‘Really?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear what the doctor said?’

  ‘He said it could be. Is that what you call confirmed?’

  ‘What did you want, a sworn statement?’ replied Caldas. ‘It’ll do me.’

  Estevez shrugged. ‘All right. Let’s take it he was hit with the spanner. There aren’t any fingerprints or clues of any kind, so what good does it do us?’

  The inspector rubbed his eyes. Estevez was right. It was five days since Castelo’s murder and they’d hardly progressed at all.

  ‘What do we really know?’ said his assistant.

  Caldas considered telling Estevez to go to hell. Couldn’t he see his boss was in no fit state to think? The boat trip had left him feeling quite ragged.

  ‘You start,’ he muttered.

  ‘Well, we don’t know a thing,’ said Estevez, spreading his arms. ‘We’ve got no suspect, no motive, nothing.’

  ‘We know he’d been threatened.’

  ‘What if the graffiti on his boat was part of the set-up?’ asked Estevez. ‘Everyone believing that Castelo was scared made it even more likely that we’d think he committed suicide.’

  Why was Estevez insisting on making him think?

  ‘On the contrary, Rafa. By scaring him they’d only put him on his guard. Anyway, it’s not just the graffiti. There’s what Arias’s neighbour overheard. Remember that Castelo went into Arias’s house saying he couldn’t take it any more,’ said Caldas, drumming his fingers on his cigarette packet. ‘And the waiter at the Refugio del Pescador said something similar. And there are all the lucky charms. Castelo really was scared.’

  ‘You’re not still thinking of Captain Sousa, are you? If you take what Barrio said as definitive, Sousa’s macana didn’t have anything to do with it.’

  Caldas wondered how he’d ever get rid of his headache if Estevez kept pestering him.

  ‘No, it didn’t, Rafa. But there’s the stuff painted on the boat, the lucky charms, and the calls between the fishermen after all those years. You saw the look on the faces of José Arias and Marcos Valverde as well as I did. What are those two scared of? On top of all that, guess who used to go fishing in the pool where El Rubio’s boat was found?’

  ‘Captain Sousa?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Trabazo told me. Sousa sometimes set his traps there.’

  Estevez placed his palms together and Caldas thought he was going to kneel and recite a Hail Mary.

  ‘Please,’ said his assistant, ‘would you mind not doing that with the cigarettes? If you need something to help you think, I can whistle the tune they play for you on the radio.’

  Caldas flushed and put down the cigarette packet. Who the hell did Estevez think he was?

  ‘Surely you don’t still believe that Castelo was murdered by a ghost?’ Estevez went on.

  ‘No, not by a ghost,’ sighed Caldas.

  ‘Well?’

  Would he never leave?

  ‘Well what?’ asked Caldas.

  ‘Do you still think that Captain Sousa has something to do with all of this?’

  ‘I don’t know how, but I think he has. It can’t be a coincidence. Did you call the radio station in Barcelona?’

  Estevez nodded. ‘Sousa’s son was working last weekend,’ he said. ‘There are more than twenty witnesses corroborating it. He didn’t kill Castelo.’

  It was what Caldas had expected.

  ‘Right,’ he said and, picking up a document at random from his desk, he pretended to start reading. But Estevez went on, ‘Here’s a thought.’

  Caldas put the document down.

  ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘Maybe Arias and Valverde are scared of us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Of us nosing around knowing it wasn’t suicide. Didn’t you say that there had to be at least two people involved?’

  ‘I don’t think it was them,’ said the inspector, restraining the urge to toy with the cigarette packet.

&n
bsp; ‘Why not?’

  ‘You saw for yourself, things are going pretty well for Valverde these days, and Arias doesn’t seem like the kind of man who goes looking for trouble. They haven’t spoken to each other in more than twelve years. What would they gain from El Rubio’s death? Anyway, both Arias and Valverde said they didn’t believe it was suicide. Would you say that if you were the murderer? No, those two are scared of something else.’

  Estevez nodded. ‘There’s one more thing I don’t understand,’ he said after a moment. ‘How did the murderers know that Castelo would be out in his boat early on Sunday morning?’

  Caldas had also wondered about this.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he whispered.

  Estevez looked down, maybe to stare at Caldas’s dirty shoes, or to avoid watching him play with his cigarettes again.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’

  ‘Nothing,’ replied Estevez.

  Caldas leaned back expecting more questions, but Estevez turned and left the office. When Rafael Estevez said ‘Nothing’ he meant exactly that: nothing.

  The Blue Folder

  That lunchtime Caldas only left his office to go to the toilets to wipe his shoes with toilet paper. The rest of the time he lay back in his black chair, going over the details of the investigation, wondering if he’d missed something.

  He opened the blue folder yet again. It now contained Barcia’s report on the preliminary inspection of the boat found by the lighthouse at Punta Lameda. This maintained that the hull had been breached from the inside. Unfortunately, its time underwater had wiped the boat clean of traces.

  He called Forensics. Back from a morning searching at Punta Lameda, Ferro confirmed that the rocks used to weigh down the boat had been collected from near the pool. Ferro had found tyre marks on the track nearby, but no prints of any kind around the rock pool. The rain that week had washed them away.

  Caldas reread Barcia’s report and all the newspaper cuttings about the sinking of the Xurelo. He thought of El Rubio’s phone call to José Arias. The shipwrecked boat was the only link between the two fishermen. Something had caused them to get in touch again after all these years, but what?

  He also glanced at the report on the recovery of Captain Sousa’s body. At one stage he’d doubted that the corpse found in the nets of the trawler really was that of the skipper of the Xurelo. Now he believed it made no sense for Sousa to have hidden for so long. In addition, the pathologist had determined that Castelo hadn’t been struck by the wooden cudgel Sousa carried on his belt, but with the spanner found among the rocks. And, anyway, ghosts didn’t act in pairs.

  Caldas had thought that the murder might be part of a plot for revenge, retribution for a wrong inflicted many years before, but the skipper’s only son had a solid alibi: he’d been over a thousand kilometres away on the day of El Rubio’s murder.

  But if Sousa wasn’t involved in Castelo’s death, why the hell had the date of the sinking been daubed on the rowing boat? Why was somebody stirring all that up again?

  After four days’ investigation, they had found neither motive nor a single suspect. They had no idea why the murder had been committed or by whom. Estevez was right. They had nothing.

  In the middle of the afternoon he glanced at his watch. If he hurried he could still get to the hospital in time. He put the papers back in the folder and returned it to the pile it had come from.

  After taking his leave of Estevez until the following Monday, he went outside and lit a cigarette. His headache had abated.

  Old Sea Dogs

  The door to room 211 was ajar. Caldas knocked before stepping inside. Two nurses were busying themselves around Uncle Alberto’s bed.

  ‘Shall I wait outside?’ asked Caldas.

  ‘Probably best,’ said one of the nurses.

  Caldas went out and walked down the corridor to the waiting room. His father was sitting there, chatting to a young woman.

  ‘Leo!’ he smiled.

  ‘Is he all right?’ asked the inspector, gesturing towards his uncle’s room.

  ‘They’re changing him,’ his father said, seeking to reassure him before introducing the young woman: ‘Silvia’s mother is in 208,’ he said. ‘This is my son Leo. He works in radio, you know.’

  Caldas smiled stiffly at the woman.

  ‘I’d better get back to her,’ she said, standing up.

  ‘So I work in radio, do I?’ he asked, once the woman had disappeared down the corridor. ‘Is that how you’re introducing me now?’

  ‘Would you rather I said you’re an old sea dog?’

  ‘So you’ve spoken to Trabazo?’

  ‘What do you think?’ said his father with a smile.

  Caldas sat down beside him.

  ‘He was worried about you,’ added his father.

  ‘I’m not surprised. I felt bloody awful.’

  ‘He, on the other hand, is still in great shape, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  A nurse came out of Uncle Alberto’s room. The inspector’s father got to his feet but sat down again when he saw her go back inside.

  ‘By the way, do you know someone called Marcos Valverde?’ asked Caldas.

  ‘Should I?’ asked his father.

  ‘He’s a developer in Panxón and he’s just started making wine. He knows you. He sends his regards.’

  His father raised his eyes, trying to remember. ‘What’s his wine called?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s bottled his first vintage yet.’

  ‘The name doesn’t ring a bell,’ he said. ‘But send him my regards anyway.’

  Caldas smiled.

  ‘Alba called me.’

  ‘Alba?’ said his father, not looking at him.

  ‘Yes. This morning.’

  ‘I was only going to ask about her if you mentioned me retiring again.’

  Caldas wondered if he really did only talk about Alba to get back at him.

  ‘I’m joking,’ said his father, pulling a face. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She’d heard Alberto was in hospital and wanted to know how he was.’

  ‘She asked about Alberto?’

  ‘Yes, and you.’

  ‘She must have wanted something else …’

  Caldas shrugged. ‘No, she was just calling to tell me to give you her love.’

  ‘And that’s all?’

  ‘That’s all,’ said Caldas.

  His father looked into his eyes. ‘How did she sound?’

  ‘OK, I suppose.’

  ‘You suppose?’

  ‘We only spoke for a minute,’ said the inspector. He looked down at a point between his feet on the white hospital floor, as Alicia Castelo had done the day he had met her outside the pathologist’s lab. He was beginning to think it had been a bad idea to tell his father about the call. When the subject of Alba came up the conversation always ended badly.

  ‘The police must be in dire straits if you’ve reached the rank of inspector, son.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re going to earn a top spot in my Book of Idiots.’

  ‘Me?’ said Caldas. They’d been talking about Alba for a minute, maybe two, and his father was already insulting him.

  ‘Don’t you see, if she’d only called to send me her love, she’d have called me herself?’ said his father.

  ‘She’d have called you?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’

  ‘You speak to Alba?’

  ‘That’s not OK?’

  Caldas shrugged. ‘I don’t know …’

  ‘Anyway, never mind. I’m sorry. The fact is she called you and told you to give me her love, didn’t she?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  They sat in silence until his father asked, ‘Do you want me to listen or to give you my advice?’

  Caldas looked up. ‘You know I don’t like talking,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ said his father.

  A nurse looked in and said they’d finished changi
ng the patient. Caldas’s father thanked her and stood up.

  ‘Coming?’ he said, and the inspector followed him down the corridor.

  They entered the room. The television was on, muted: Uncle Alberto’s window on to the world.

  ‘Look who’s here,’ said the inspector’s father. The patient’s face wrinkled into a smile behind the green respiratory mask.

  Caldas told him about his trip in Manuel Trabazo’s boat that morning.

  ‘Speaking of boats,’ interjected the inspector’s father, indicating the television.

  A news bulletin was showing aerial shots of the crew of a boat being rescued in a storm. They were being hoisted, one by one, from the deck up to a helicopter. A caption at the bottom of the screen read: ‘All eleven crewmembers of Galician trawler wrecked on Great Sole Bank rescued alive.’

  The item ended with pictures of the listing boat, now crewless, being swallowed by the waves. Caldas thought of the Xurelo, and the nightmare Captain Sousa and his crew had gone through. And of the case that was getting away from him.

  They continued watching the bulletin, and Caldas observed his father and uncle discussing each story in their wordless language.

  He recalled a film he’d seen with Alba some time ago. The central character was an old man who travelled hundreds of kilometres on a lawnmower to visit his sick brother, from whom he’d been estranged for years. At the end of the journey, at the brother’s house, they’d hardly said anything. They’d sat together on the porch, settling their differences with no need for words.

  It was dark by the time they left the hospital. Caldas walked his father to the car.

  ‘You’re not coming, are you?’ his father asked, opening the door.

  Caldas shook his head. ‘I’ve got to work,’ he apologised.

  ‘It’s Friday.’

  ‘I know,’ said Caldas.

  ‘I’ll be getting here around one tomorrow,’ said his father, gesturing towards the hospital building. ‘On Saturdays visiting hours start before lunch.’

  ‘I’ll try to drop by.’

  His father nodded, then said: ‘About what you said earlier …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About Alba.’

  ‘Ah.’