Death on a Galician Shore (10 page)

‘Well, like everyone.’

Caldas had a feeling that if he wanted to get definite answers out of the wrinkled old man now draining his cup of coffee he’d have to drag them out of him.

‘When did you last see Castelo?’

‘El Rubio?’ Hermida raised his eyebrows as he thought back. ‘I think it was Saturday, at the auction.’

‘You didn’t see him after that?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘But my wife saw him on Sunday morning, in his boat.’

‘So it was your wife who saw Castelo go out fishing on Sunday morning?’

‘Who said anything about fishing?’

‘Didn’t you just say your wife saw him in his boat?’ asked Caldas.

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ retorted Hermida and, with a liver-spotted hand, gestured towards the jetty that protected the harbour. ‘See those traps?’

Caldas and Estevez looked where the fisherman was pointing. Through the window they saw several dozen traps piled up against the jetty wall.

‘They belong to El Rubio,’ said Hermida.

‘So Castelo wasn’t fishing?’ asked the inspector, surprised.

‘Would you go fishing and leave all your gear behind?’

Caldas drew on his cigarette and looked again at the stacked traps, forming a dark shape against the white wall.

‘So what was he doing?’

The old man said nothing, simply spreading his arms in a shrug.

Until then, Caldas had assumed that someone had spotted Castelo setting out fishing, but seeing the traps had dispelled that possibility. So why, Caldas wondered, had Justo Castelo, the man everyone called El Rubio, put out to sea that morning?

‘Had you noticed anything odd about Castelo lately?’ he asked, expecting another of the vague answers that so annoyed his assistant.

Hermida, however, decided to stick his head above the parapet. ‘Personally, I think he was scared.’

‘Scared?’

‘Yes, scared,’ he said.

‘Did he say so?’

‘El Rubio didn’t talk much.’

‘So why do you think he was scared?’

‘Strange things happened.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Things,’ replied the old man, retreating. He turned round and asked the waiter for another coffee.

Caldas waited for the coffee to arrive before asking: ‘What kind of things?’

‘Didn’t you just speak to the auctioneer?’

‘Yes, but he didn’t mention anything strange going on.’

‘Didn’t he tell you about the shipwreck?’

‘You mean the boat Arias and Castelo worked on?’

The fisherman nodded slowly.

‘He said it foundered, that one man died, and that Arias and Castelo became estranged because of it. But that happened a long time ago, didn’t it?’

‘Over ten years ago,’ confirmed Hermida.

‘So what has it got to do with Castelo being scared?’ asked Caldas.

‘As I said, strange things had been happening for some time.’

‘What kind of things? Caldas asked again.

‘Things.’

‘Could you be more specific?’ the inspector pressed.

Hermida looked around. The Refugio del Pescador was empty. He leaned forward and said quietly: ‘He’s been seen again a few times.’

Estevez, who’d been quiet until this moment, interrupted: ‘You call that being more specific?’

‘Please ignore him, Ernesto,’ said Caldas quickly. ‘Who’s been seen?’

‘Who else?’ said the fisherman, glancing around again. ‘Captain Sousa.’

The name was new to the policemen.

‘Who’s Captain Sousa?’ asked Caldas.

‘Keep your voice down,’ said Hermida. Then he whispered: ‘He was the skipper of the boat that went down.’

‘And you say he’s been seen again?’ asked Caldas.

Hermida nodded gravely.

‘Where?’

‘Several places.’

Mystified as to why it was strange that Captain Sousa had been seen again, Caldas asked: ‘Had he left the village?’

‘You don’t understand, Inspector,’ muttered the fisherman. ‘Captain Sousa drowned when the boat went down.’

‘Drowned?’ repeated Caldas, puzzled.

‘Yes. But he must have had old scores to settle so that’s why he came back,’ said the old man. ‘And that’s why El Rubio was scared. So scared he decided to kill himself.’

The policemen stared in silence at the fisherman’s deeply lined face as he nodded slowly to add gravitas to his words.

‘So you mean a ghost, an apparition?’ asked the inspector.

Hermida knocked on one of the metal table legs and spat on the floor.

‘Touch metal,’ he muttered.

‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing?’ yelled Estevez, springing out of his chair.

‘Calm down, Rafa,’ said the inspector. ‘He wasn’t giving you the evil eye.’

‘I couldn’t give a fuck about the evil eye!’ said Estevez angrily, reaching for a napkin from the next table. ‘He just spat on my shoe.’

With the first light of day the boats, no longer vague shapes in the darkness, could be seen, lined up, almost motionless, bows pointing towards the Playa de Panxón.

There were no more than twenty of them, mostly small
gamelas
with oars or small outboard motors. The policemen could make out Arias’s and Hermida’s vessels, which were a little bigger than the rest and had traps piled on deck. A dark-blue yacht, its mast pointing up at the sky and swaying slowly, stood out among the fishing boats like a glass of champagne on the counter of a roadside bar.

The dead man’s rowing boat was still moored to its buoy. Caldas had called Forensics and officers would soon be arriving to remove the boat from the water and examine it, and the trailer.

Following old Hermida’s claim that the fisherman’s death was linked to the apparition of a skipper drowned years earlier, the policemen had spoken to the waiter at the Refugio del Pescador. His colleague who worked the afternoon shift (the waiter who, according to Arias, Castelo had been talking to the day before his death) wouldn’t be coming in until four.

Two men sat at the end of the jetty, their fishing rods out over the water. The policemen headed towards them. Caldas looked at the village, where almost nothing stirred. It looked like a stage set someone had placed between the sky and the beach.

The gate of the yacht club was open and, opposite, so was the sliding door to the boathouse in which sat several small sailing boats under canvas covers. It would be a few months yet before anyone put
to sea in them. From somewhere inside the boathouse came the sound of sawing.

They walked on. A cold sea wind, salt-laden, lashed their faces. For a moment, Caldas forgot why they were there. Justo Castelo’s traps brought him back to reality, reminding him that someone had cruelly murdered the fisherman they called El Rubio, knocking him unconscious and then throwing him into the sea with his hands tied. Caldas was sure the intention had not been simply to prevent him swimming but to make the murder look like suicide, to convince the inhabitants of the village that the fisherman had decided to bring his own life to a premature end.

Estevez stopped in front of the traps. They were neatly stacked one on top of the other, leaning in two piles against the whitewashed wall.

‘How do these work?’ he asked.

‘They’re like cages with sides made of netting,’ replied the inspector, pointing at one of the top ones.

‘I can see that, Inspector.’

‘Well, there you go. The bait goes inside and they’re dropped to the sea bottom. When crabs go after the bait, they get trapped.’

Estevez pointed to a short, wide funnel in the top of the trap. ‘Is that where they get in?’

‘That’s right. They’re attracted by the bait and they climb up the sides until they find the opening.’

‘Why don’t they get out the same way they got in?’ asked Estevez.

‘Because crabs can’t swim,’ explained the inspector. ‘They’d have to crawl upside-down to find the way out.’

‘What about shrimp? They can swim.’

Caldas showed him the traps in the other pile. The netting had a finer mesh.

‘They’re pretty much the same, but the mesh’s finer so they can’t escape, and the funnel is smaller and conical, much wider on the outside than the inside.’

‘To entice them in.’

‘And make sure they stay in,’ added Caldas. ‘Because they can’t get out.’

They made their way to the end of the jetty, where the two anglers sat humming to themselves, staring at their lines cast into the water.

Looking down, they could see fish swimming near the surface, circling the hooks, oblivious to the imminent danger. One of the rods suddenly bent violently and the man holding it stopped humming.

‘First one,’ he smiled, and winked at the policemen.

He started reeling in, carefully at first, then faster, until he pulled out a struggling fish. He unhooked it and dropped it into a metal crate. After baiting the hook again, he flicked the line back out to sea. Caldas approached the crate and saw a gleaming mackerel, writhing frantically.

After a couple of minutes, the thrashing subsided into intermittent spasms. The mackerel, mouth open and gills palpitating in a desperate effort to breathe, would remain motionless for a moment, then summon the energy for another convulsion, its death throes seeming interminable.

Caldas recalled Guzman Barrio’s words in the autopsy room. ‘Have you ever seen a fish die out of water?’ he’d asked.

The mackerel shuddered once more, and Caldas imagined Justo Castelo struggling to breathe beneath the waves, water flooding his lungs. He wondered whether the murderer had struck him on the head out of mercy.

There were three more mackerel in the crate by the time Caldas spotted Hermida and his wife at the foot of the slipway, placing their rowing boat face down on its trailer. Arias had pulled his trailer up to the platform himself, but the elderly couple needed their car to tow the trailer up the small stone slipway and park it alongside the others.

‘I’m going to have a word with the old boy’s wife,’ said Caldas quietly. ‘Let’s find out what she saw the other day.’

‘If she hits the brandy at eight in the morning like her husband, she probably sees ghosts, too,’ said Estevez. ‘Shall I come with you?’

‘No,’ said Caldas, turning his head towards the two anglers. ‘See if those two can tell you anything.’

‘It was half past six in the morning,’ said Ernesto Hermida’s wife, standing on the flat part of the slipway, next to her husband’s trailer and boat.

‘Did you check your watch?’ asked Caldas.

‘I didn’t need to check anything,’ said the woman. ‘I look out every morning at half past six to see what the sea’s like. I find it comforting. I’ve been doing it for years.’

‘Do you still look out even when your husband’s not going fishing?’

‘It’s all the same whether he’s going out or not. It’s a habit. I wake up and I have to go to the living room and see what the sea’s doing.’

‘I understand,’ said Caldas, turning towards the buildings across the road. ‘Which is your window?’

The woman pointed to a balcony on the second floor of a building near the fish market, the ground floor occupied by a small chandlery shop.

‘So you got up at six thirty and looked out of the window.’

‘That’s right.’

‘What did you see exactly?’

‘I saw El Rubio.’

‘Where did you see him? Here, in the harbour?’

‘No, he was in his rowing boat, heading out between those first few boats.’

Caldas recalled that, first thing that morning, even though he and Estevez had been right by the water’s edge, they could hardly make out the boats in the darkness.

‘How did you know it was Castelo?’

‘By the boat, son. Over time you learn to recognise boats better than people.’

‘Did you definitely see it was him rowing?’

‘He was well covered up in his waterproofs, like they all are when it’s raining. And it’s pretty dark at that time of day. But I was sure it was El Rubio,’ she said sadly. ‘Turns out I was right.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Poor lad,’ she added, as if talking about a boy rather than the adult whose stiff corpse Caldas had seen lying on the trolley.

‘Was he alone?’

‘Of course, Inspector.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Absolutely,’ she said without hesitation, and pointed to the dead fisherman’s rowing boat, swaying on the water by the buoy. ‘El Rubio’s boat is that tiny one over there. If there’d been anyone in it with him I’d have seen.’

Caldas looked at the dead man’s rowing boat. Hermida’s wife was right: there was no way anyone could have hidden in such a small craft.

‘Weren’t you surprised to see him rowing out to his fishing boat?’

‘Why would I be surprised?’

‘It was a Sunday morning and it was raining,’ said Caldas. ‘It wasn’t a day for putting out to sea, was it?’

‘If they stayed at home whenever it rained I don’t know what we’d eat, son.’

‘But fishing is banned on Sundays.’

‘I thought he was going to fetch something from his boat. Ernesto often forgets his keys and has to go back to the boat to get them. He grumbles about his joints, but I think it’s his brain that’s bad. Even though he doesn’t drink any more.’

Caldas smiled to himself and continued questioning the woman.

‘Did you see him again after that?’

‘Yes, a few minutes later. When he switched on the boat headlight.’

‘Was there anyone else on board?’

‘I already told you there wasn’t,’ she said unhesitatingly. ‘I may be old but I can still see fine. I don’t even need glasses for sewing.’

‘Did you see anything else?’ asked Caldas.

‘No. I went to the kitchen to make coffee,’ replied Hermida’s wife, before lamenting: ‘Poor lad! If I’d known the foolishness he was planning I’d have woken Ernesto.’

‘There was no way you could have known …’

A teenage boy came up the street and attached a flyer to the door of the fish market with four strips of adhesive tape.

‘There’s the death notice,’ said Hermida’s wife.

They crossed the road together. The name of Justo Castelo, aged forty-two, was printed in large letters, beneath a cross, followed by the announcement that the funeral would be held that afternoon. Caldas thought of the sadness in Alicia Castelo’s eyes as she had asked when the body would be released, and he was pleased that the coroner hadn’t delayed things longer than necessary.