The Summer of Dead Toys (16 page)

Hello, I know it’s been a long time since I gave any signs of life, and I won’t insist on us seeing each other, at least for the moment. In fact, I have to return to Barcelona to sort out some unfinished business. I don’t even know how to do it, but I know I have to try. When all this is over, I’d like us to meet. In Paris or Barcelona, wherever you like.
A kiss,

“No, I have no idea to what business he’s referring. At the time, I thought it must be something to do with studying, focusing on a degree or something like that. The truth is, I didn’t place that much importance on it until yesterday afternoon. I started reading all the emails, one after the other, like it was a real conversation. This is the last one I received from him.” Héctor and Superintendent Savall exchanged glances. There was little to say. That message could refer to anything, and nothing.

“I know this may seem a little far-fetched, but I don’t know . . . maybe it’s something else, maybe it has something to do with his death.” Her hands moved restlessly, more out of impatience than sorrow, and she stood up. “Well, I suppose it’s just foolishness on my part.”

“Joana.” Savall stood up as well and walked around the table to her. “Nothing is foolish in an investigation. I told you we’d get to the bottom of this and so we will. But you must understand, accept, that perhaps the obvious explanation is what really happened. Accidents are difficult to come to terms with, and yet they happen.”

Joana nodded, although Héctor had the feeling that wasn’t what was worrying her. Or at least not only that. She must have been a very pretty woman, and she still was in a way, he thought. Elegant and stylish, although her face showed a glimpse of the passing of the years which she did nothing to disguise. No make-up, or operations. Joana Vidal accepted maturity in a natural way and the result was a dignity lacking in other faces of her age. He watched her, taking advantage of the fact that she seemed absorbed in what the super was saying to her.

“We’ll keep you informed. Personally. Inspector Salgado or myself, I promise you. Try to relax.”
Savall offered to see her to the door, but she refused, with the same impatient gesture that Héctor had noticed a few minutes before. She couldn’t be an easy woman, of that he was sure, and as he watched her walk away the image of Meryl Streep came to mind. The figure of Leire Castro, who’d approached as soon as Joana Vidal emerged, brought him back to reality.
“Do you have a moment, Inspector?”
“Yes, but if I’m honest I need a cigarette. Do you smoke?” he asked her for the first time.
“More than I should and less than I feel like.”
He smiled.
“Well, now you will on your superior’s order.”
Without knowing why, Leire continued the game. “I’ve been asked to do worse.”
He raised his hands in a gesture of mock innocence.
“I don’t believe you . . . Let’s go and contaminate the air in the street and you can tell me about it.”
They managed to find a corner in the shade, although shade in Barcelona is a false refuge. The midday sun was beating down on the city and the humidity increased the temperature to African levels.
“That was Marc’s mother, wasn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes.” He took a long drag and blew the smoke out, slowly. “Tell me, was there anything on the laptop or mobile?”
She nodded.
“We’re investigating the numbers, although the majority of calls and texts in the days before his death are to Gina Martí and Aleix Rovira. And some Iris, although in her case they are basically WhatsApps.” He showed his discomfort, and she explained what she was talking about. “It’s free, and by the prefix we know this girl was in Ireland. In Dublin, I suppose. They spoke very little English—the girl must be Spanish—and from what I’ve read, Marc was crazy about her. I’ve transcribed all the messages to see if there’s anything, but at first glance they seem normal: I miss you, wish you were here. I think they were planning to see each other because there’s some reference to ‘soon this will all be over’.” She smiled. “All with very unromantic abbreviations, to tell the truth. With regard to the laptop, they’re trying to repair it but they told me it’s pretty wrecked. As if it was broken on purpose.”
“Yeah.” The laptop worried him. He was going to voice his doubts out loud, but Leire didn’t let him.
“There’s something else I realized last night at home.” Her eyes shone, and Héctor noticed for the first time that they were dark green, at least in the sun. “There’s no way to sleep in this heat, so I went out on to the terrace to smoke a cigarette. I forgot the ashtray and ended up stubbing it out on the terrace, thinking I’d pick it up later. I know, it’s not very hygienic. Then, when I was in bed it occurred to me. What would you do if you were going to smoke a cigarette sitting at the window?”
He thought for a second.
“Well, I’d either flick the ash into the air or I’d bring an ashtray and have it nearby: beside me or even in my hand.”
“Exactly. And from what the cleaner told me, Glòria Vergès is obsessive about cleaning. She can’t stand smoke, or cigarette butts. I suppose that’s why the boy smoked at the window.” She paused briefly before continuing. “The butt wasn’t on the ground, at least not below the window, when we processed the scene. Yes, he could have thrown it further, but I can’t imagine Marc dirtying the garden anyway. The most logical thing was that he brought the ashtray to the window to save him the bother. But it wasn’t there. It was inside, I remember perfectly, on the shelf beside the window. I think it even appears in some of the photos we took.”
Héctor’s brain was working at full speed, despite the heat.
“It means Marc put out his cigarette and came back in.”
“I thought that. I’ve been mulling it over and it’s nothing definitive. He could easily have smoked, come in and then returned to the window. But according to what we’ve been told, it wasn’t something he usually did. I mean the idea we’ve been sold is that Marc used to sit at the window to smoke. That’s it. Not to think, not to kill time.”
“There’s another possibility,” he rebutted. “Someone might have brought in the ashtray from the window.”
“Yes, I thought of that as well. But the cleaner had to take care of Gina Martí, who had a nervous fit when she woke up; she didn’t go up to the attic before we got there. Señor Castells arrived with his brother, the priest, at the same time as us; his wife and daughter came down afterward; Glòria Vergès didn’t want her daughter to see the body, which is logical, so she stayed in the Collbató chalet until the afternoon.”
“Are you sure Gina didn’t go back into the attic in the morning?”
“According to her statement, she didn’t. The cleaner’s screams woke her and she ran downstairs to the door. Seeing Marc dead brought on a nervous fit and the woman had to make her a herbal tea, which she didn’t drink. Then we arrived. And I can’t see her taking the ashtray from the window and putting it in its place.”
“Let’s see.” Héctor half-closed his eyes. “Let’s imagine the scene: Marc has been hanging out with his friends and the night ends badly. They’ve fought. Badly enough that his t-shirt is bloodstained. Aleix leaves and he sends Gina to bed. It’s almost three a.m. and it’s hot. He changes his dirty t-shirt and before going to bed he does what he always does: smokes a cigarette sitting at the window. We’ll assume that he brought the ashtray—I’m sure he did it out of habit. So he smokes peacefully, stubs out the cigarette, and goes back into the attic: he leaves the ashtray . . .”
“See?” insisted Castro. “It doesn’t fit with the idea that he was drunk and fell accidentally. And also, if he was dizzy, he would have noticed and in that case, why go out?”
Héctor thought of the fear he’d read in Joana Vidal’s eyes just a moment before, of Enric Castells’ words, denying with excessive vehemence that his son might have thrown himself into the void voluntarily. Could it have been a suicide? A desperate outburst, because of something that had happened that night perhaps? Or had someone come in, argued with him and ended up pushing him out of the window? It had to be a relatively strong person, which discounted Gina. Aleix? Had they fought, and the broken computer was the result? Leire seemed to follow his reasoning as her eyes were sparkling.
“I did something else,” she said. “This morning I called the Faculty of Computer Science, where Aleix Rovira studies. It wasn’t easy, but in the end they told me: he hasn’t passed a single subject; in fact he’s practically not attended classes since Easter.”
“Wasn’t he some kind of child prodigy?”
“Well, it seems he lost his superpowers when he went to university.”
“Check his calls. I want to know everything about Rovira: who he calls, where he goes, what he usually says, what he does in his spare time, which must be plentiful if he’s not attending class. I get the impression these two brats are playing with us. I’ll call him into the station on Monday so he’ll have to sweat a little. Any problem?”
Leire shook her head, although her expression wasn’t nearly as certain. In fact, that evening she had to collect Tomás from Sants station, and in theory she was off this weekend. She was going to say so out loud when she thought having something to do might not be a bad idea.
“No problem, Inspector.”
“Great. Another thing: Marc wrote to his mother saying he had something he had to sort out here. I don’t think it’s important but—”
“But in this case we’re going along blindly, don’t you think?”
“Completely blind.” He remembered what Savall had said to him and added, unable to avoid a slightly ironic tone, “And don’t forget all this is ‘unofficial.’ I’ll talk to the superintendent. I want to get all possible information on Aleix Rovira together before Monday. Take care of it; I’ll look after interrogating Óscar Vaquero.”
She seemed taken aback.
“The fatty they played the trick on. Yes, I know it was a couple of years ago, but sometimes grudges don’t disappear with time, more like the opposite.” A cynical smile spread over his face. “I assure you.”

The air conditioning in that sorry room made an infernal noise. With the curtains—stiff pieces of a moss-green fabric—pulled to block out the blazing sun falling on the city at that hour, the drone of the machine resembled the labored roar of a beast from the underworld. It could have been a roadside motel, one of those establishments that, despite their sordidness, radiate romance or at least sensuality. Rooms that smell of sweaty sheets and intertwined bodies, of furtive but inevitable sex, of desires never fully satiated, of quick showers and cheap cologne. In reality, it wasn’t a motel but a pensión near Plaça Universitat, discreet and even clean if you looked at it with a favorable eye—or, better still, didn’t look at it too much at all—specializing in renting rooms by the hour. Given the proximity to the Gayxample, the gay area par excellence of Barcelona, the majority of the clientele were homosexual, something that in a way was reassuring to Regina. In the seven months of this year so far she’d come more or less regularly to this pensión without ever bumping into anyone she knew. The worst was going in and coming out, but up to now she’d been lucky. Certainly because deep down she couldn’t care less. Not that she and Salvador had an explicitly open relationship, but it had to be more or less obvious to her husband that if he wasn’t making love to her, someone else would have to take his place in bed at least once in a while.

If she was honest with herself, Regina had to admit that when she married Salvador, sixteen years her senior, it wasn’t because the man was an animal in the sexual realm, although in the early years she’d had no cause for complaint in that respect. No, Regina wasn’t an especially passionate woman, but she was proud. She’d been married for twenty-one years and for the first half of that time she had been tremendously happy. Salvador adored her, with a devotion that seemed unswerving, eternal. And she blossomed in his flattery, in those glances that caressed her like a tight mesh enhancing her curves, but not too tight. The only thing she didn’t allow for when she married this gentleman, unconventionally attractive, tall and already gray in the wedding photo, was that this well-known intellectual’s tastes wouldn’t change over time. If at forty-five Salvador noticed twentysomething girls, at sixty-five his interests were still centred on the same young bodies, the same insultingly smooth faces. The kind that need only soap and water to shine. And those young girls, even sillier than Regina had been years ago, found him distinguished, charming, intelligent. Even romantic. They excitedly read his love stories—urban fairytales with titles like
The Sweet Taste of First Dates
or
Overlooking Sadness
, which he started to write when his profound books with experimental aspirations bored even the most pretentious critics—and attended his lectures in which words like desire, skin, taste and melancholy were repeated ad nauseam.

It was a hard blow to Regina, realizing that his constant admiration was fading little by little. Or rather it was subtly shifting in other directions. At thirty-eight Regina was no longer the coveted white ball of the billiards game, the centre of her husband’s attentions; and by forty-five she’d definitely become the black ball, the one whose turn comes only at the end of the game when there’s no other option. Now, turning fifty, after various facial touch-ups that hadn’t received more than a glimmer of recognition from Salvador, she’d decided to change her game. One day logic had prevailed over selfesteem: she had realized that she was fighting against an enemy as brutal as it was implacable, one she could hold back but not defeat. It had been her New Year’s resolution of the previous year: raise her self-esteem whatever the cost. And looking around her, she discovered that the glances her husband no longer gave her could come, surprisingly, from unexpected corners. In one sense, she thought, infidelity restored order and balanced her marriage. And although at the beginning she wasn’t really seeking sex, more to heal a battered ego which didn’t respond to anti-wrinkle treatments or the incisions of a scalpel, the avalanche of feelings she experienced from those strong muscular arms, hard smooth buttocks like blunt rocks, clumsy kisses and that restless tongue, which reached the most remote corners of her sex, was a real surprise. This new-generation lover was capable of fucking her to exhaustion and never losing his smile, of biting her neck like a playful puppy, even of slapping her when the pleasure was so intense his eyes closed without wanting them to. Like her, like everyone, he wanted to be seen and admired, but involuntarily unlike others, the big opinion he had of himself stayed in the street; in bed he was generous and tireless, demanding and affectionate. Some days a real bastard; some days a scared kid who asks for hugs. She wouldn’t have known how to say which she preferred; she did know that week by week she’d become hooked on those games behind closed doors, and the idea of going a month without seeing him, exiled on the Costa Brava with a sexagenarian husband she found repulsive now— the image of Salvador in trunks had become a nightmare she couldn’t escape—and a daughter in a full-on emotional storm was frankly disagreeable. Thank God, she wasn’t “in love” with someone who could be her son; in fact for a while now she had doubted the existence of this love with a capital “L” of which her husband never tired of writing, to the delight of women who wanted to live in such books. It was, simply, the inescapable lure of weeks that without him would have had no core. Although at times, alone in her room, she enjoyed remembering these encounters so much, nevertheless she thought she could go without them . . . That day would come, she was sure, but in the meantime she would hoard explicit gruesome details in her memory to which her body responded without hesitation.