The Whispering City (25 page)

Ana’s voice brought her back to reality; they were intruders in someone else’s home. ‘We should leave. We’ve been here for a long time.’

‘Really! You don’t say.’

Beatriz grabbed one of the files. The material was fascinating; she wanted to read more. ‘We can borrow this, can’t we? I suppose this must be very interesting to a journalist.’

‘What are you saying? That would be concealing evidence.’

‘At this point they aren’t evidence of anything.’

‘They’re evidence. Leave them where they are.’

Beatriz didn’t let go. Ana went on, ‘I don’t know what Castro would do to me if he found out that I’d taken something from the house.’

Of course. She would have to tell the police about her discovery. She put the folder back in its place, along with the others, and they closed the cabinet.

They went downstairs. As they were opening the door to leave, a voice came from the other side of it.

‘Abel? Señor Abel, are you at home?’

It was too late for Ana to stop mid-motion; she opened the door and found that the voice belonged to a woman in her thirties. It was obvious that she had come running – her wide skirt was still swaying and a lock of hair had slipped out of the white ribbon she wore around her head.

Ana, with Beatriz standing behind her, replied, ‘No, he’s not at home.’

Several different expressions crossed the woman’s face: disappointment, confusion and curiosity.

‘Who are you? I haven’t seen you around here before.’

‘Relatives. We’re his cousins.’ Ana smiled. ‘And may I ask who you are?’ The woman smoothed her skirt.

‘Montserrat Rius, I live over the road. Sometimes I take in parcels that come for Señor Abel. But I haven’t seen him for a few days, and I was surprised because he usually lets me know so I can watch for the postman. And when I saw you…’

Beatriz held back a smile. The neighbour was obviously fishing to find out more about these women who were visiting Abel Mendoza. She gave them an apologetic smile.

‘And, tell me, how did you get into the house?’

‘With this key.’ Beatriz turned the key in the lock, pulled it out and displayed it in the air for a moment before dropping it into her handbag.

Three deep wrinkles appeared on Montserrat Rius’s forehead.

‘That’s odd. Señor Mendoza never gives out his key. Not even to me. When he leaves the house, he leaves everything well locked up, the blinds lowered, the shutters closed. He doesn’t even let me go in, and we’ve been neighbours for ever.’

Beatriz smiled with extreme friendliness. ‘But we are family.’

She had just found the key hanging from a small hook behind the door. She couldn’t imagine what it was doing there, but that was the least of her concerns; it had got them out of a real fix.

Ana addressed the neighbour again, ‘Goodness. What a shame cousin Abel isn’t here! We were passing through, and hoped to find him at home. You don’t have any idea where he could be, do you?’

‘No, but it’s not the first time he’s gone away for a few days.’

She gave them a brief stare before saying goodbye and starting back to her house.

Ana followed her with her eyes as she headed off. Beatriz took her by the arm. ‘We’d better leave. I don’t think she believed us. If we’re not careful, she might even call the police.’

As they went to the car, she took a last glance at the house. Something on the first floor had made her feel uncomfortable, something strange. She mentioned it to Ana as they got into the car.

‘It must have been nerves,’ her cousin replied. ‘You don’t uncover something like this every day, do you?’

It was true. Although, given the choice, she would rather be unearthing the animal symbolism in
The Book of Good Love
.

30

They were barely out of Martorell when it started to rain hard.

Beatriz had driven with exasperating slowness on the way there because of her hangover, and now she did so because of the poor visibility.

‘You have to drive according to the weather conditions,’ she justified herself to her cousin.

And according to your age
, Ana was about to add spitefully, but she held her tongue. She was aware that her irritation was due to nerves. They had made a real discovery, and she was dying to shout it from the rooftops; she was euphoric. Beatriz took it upon herself to burst her bubble: ‘How sad!’

‘Why?’

‘All those letters from abandoned women.’

‘True,’ she said, hoping to nip the subject in the bud. Too late. Many of the abandoned women had responded to his ending things in letters. Letters that oozed desperation, regardless of the tone they adopted, from the proud spite of ‘it’s your loss’ to the absolute humiliation of ‘I’m willing to do anything for you. Just ask and I’ll do it’. There were threats, pleas, offers. All of them from lonely women who now felt twice as alone after being duped by that Don Juan.

‘Fear of being alone makes us easy targets,’ Ana murmured. She caught a painful wince on Beatriz’s profile when she added, ‘It seems we aren’t meant to be alone.’

‘Or we haven’t been taught how,’ responded her cousin, putting her foot down for the first time during the drive, as if she felt a pressing need to reach Barcelona. ‘But everything can be learned. Trust me.’

She was talking about herself, thought Ana. It was the first time Beatriz had done that. Ana didn’t ask any questions, although she wondered what scab she had unintentionally scratched.

After a few minutes of silence, Beatriz said, ‘He must be really heartless. When he couldn’t get any more dough out of them, he would leave them or get them to end the relationship themselves.’

‘What was different about Mariona Sobrerroca?’

Beatriz immediately understood. ‘Do you think he killed her? Really?’

‘Doesn’t it seem probable to you?’

‘It seems absurd to me, Ana. It’s killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. It’s stupid. And the man may be many things: unscrupulous, contemptible, cruel…’

‘Beatriz, you sound like a thesaurus.’

‘… but he’s not stupid. Someone capable of deceiving so many women and adopting different personalities, simultaneously even… You shouldn’t think that these women were stupid, either. We aren’t talking about naive teenagers, Ana, but grown women, with experience, who surely had some good times with him.’

‘I didn’t take you for such a liberal, Beatriz.’

‘Is that a criticism?’

‘No, no.’

They were skating on thin ice. Better get back to the case.

‘This Mendoza is someone who is always putting on and taking off masks, with the constant threat of being discovered. He’s someone who could one day lose control. Perhaps he turned up without having studied his role thoroughly enough and Mariona found him out. How would you react if you found out you were the victim of such a humiliating scam?’

‘I would report him. Despite the shame of airing the story, I would shop him, no doubt about it.’

‘You see? Can’t you imagine the scene she would make, insulting him, telling him she was going to call the police? Then he lost his cool and killed her.’

‘Possibly. There was a fight, no doubt about that.’

‘And then he strangled her.’

Beatriz didn’t answer. In profile her expression was one of extreme concentration, her brow furrowed, her lips tight. After a long silence and without turning, she said, ‘But imagine if he had come home while we were in his house? What would he have done to us? From the looks of it, he’s a murderer.’

‘We don’t know that. I was speculating, Beatriz.’

‘Perhaps. But still, I think you’ve got me into something that is even uglier than I thought.’

‘I got you into? Except for your hangover this morning, I have the feeling you did it willingly.’

Beatriz let out a weary sigh before answering, ‘You’re right, but I think this is where I bow out.’

For a few miles all that could be heard was the tapping of raindrops on the car roof. As they were waiting at the gate of a level crossing, Beatriz searched for something in her handbag. She took out her cigarette holder.

‘Mind if I smoke?’

Ana shook her head. ‘Did you learn that in Argentina, too?’

‘No. Just the holder.’

The gate started to rise. Since there were no cars behind, Beatriz lit her cigarette unhurriedly. Then she pulled away.

‘Can I ask you something, Ana? Why do you want to be a crime reporter?’

‘I don’t want to be a crime reporter, I want to be a reporter of serious news. I’m sick of fashion and society.’

‘But isn’t it a huge leap from parties to such gruesome subjects?’

‘They are two sides of the same coin,’ she started to say.

Beatriz gave her a look of admiration that she found so flattering she was almost tempted to conceal her real reasons. But, checking in briefly with her conscience, she was forced to admit, ‘I’m writing about this case because it’s the one they assigned me. I’m not fooling myself. I know that I have my name to thank for being able to work and that, on the other hand, because of my name, there are stories that will remain out of my reach, just as there are others they won’t let me near because I’m a woman. So, when the chance to write about something important came up, I jumped at it.’

Beatriz nodded in approval as she brought the cigarette holder to her lips.

Ana kept only one motive hidden: her growing fascination for this kind of thing.

The rest of the trip passed in silence, and soon they were back in Barcelona.

‘Where should I drop you?’ Beatriz asked Ana.

Beatriz had to be tired. Ana was, too: the lack of sleep, the trip, everything they had discovered was enough for one day. She imagined Beatriz would put the car back in the garage, take the lift up to her flat and find dinner prepared, but Ana still had an unpleasant formality to deal with. Because she wasn’t kidding herself – she knew Castro wouldn’t be pleased with what they had done. Her tiredness had given her the clarity she had lacked in the last few days. Her actions had been a mistake. Suddenly she saw herself and Beatriz like two amateur detectives in a British popular novel. They were amateurs, but instead of the Sussex countryside, they were nosing around Martorell, and the policeman they had to report their findings to wasn’t a rather grumpy but essentially friendly inspector. He was a detective in Barcelona’s Criminal Investigation Brigade; he didn’t wear a tweed suit or smoke a pipe and he certainly wasn’t friendly.

She asked Beatriz to drop her off at the Plaza Universidad. Her cousin, stricken by her own tiredness, didn’t notice Ana’s sudden low spirits; nor did she insist on taking her along the Ronda to her door. She was in a rush to get to her own house.

‘Come on, now go and sleep it off.’

The awkwardness of Ana’s words of farewell as she climbed out of the car was further evidence of her growing anxiety.

She walked towards Riera Alta Street, pondering what her opening gambit might be. She’d work the rest out later, but what she needed were a few phrases to get started, and she was struggling to find them. She prayed her only instrument – her tongue – wouldn’t leave her in the lurch.

She couldn’t make the call from her house. She didn’t want to be spied on by Señora Sauret. She needed a more discreet place to call from. She went into several cafés pretending to be looking for someone until she found a place where the telephone was in a booth. She asked for permission; the waiter set the meter to zero and gave her a line. She dialled Castro’s number. No answer. Maybe he had already gone home, she thought with relief after the sixth ring, but then someone picked up at the other end.

‘Hello?’

She recognised him, but she bought a little time by asking, in a tremulous voice, ‘Inspector Castro?’

‘Yes. Who is this?’

‘Ana Martí.’

No reaction at the other end. No greeting, no snort of irritation.

Castro sensed something. Or was she only imagining it, out of a bad conscience?

‘Speak.’

Yes, he had sensed something. In his case, ‘speak’ wasn’t an invitation; it assumed that she would tell him what she had to tell him. So it was best to get on with it.

‘I’m calling because I wanted to give you some information that might be useful in the Sobrerroca case.’

‘Very well. What is the information and where did you get it from?’

‘I discovered that Mariona Sobrerroca was corresponding with, and was almost definitely in a romantic relationship with, a man named Abel Mendoza, of Martorell. They met through an advertisement in the magazine
Mujer Actual
. In my opinion, this man could be a suspect in her murder.’

‘How did you find this out?’

She told him that she had had the clue from the letters she’d copied in his office, explaining how she had found out where the advert came from and how she had obtained the address in Martorell.

She wasn’t expecting applause, but the silence that followed her explanation was ominous.

‘Did you touch anything in this Mendoza’s house?’

‘I read some of the letters. That’s how I know how his scam worked.’

Silence again. She knew that Castro could tell she was hiding something, but she didn’t want to implicate Beatriz. She had been careful not to let a single ‘we’ slip out during their exchange; she had to resist that distrusting silence at the other end of the telephone.

‘You aren’t keeping anything from me?’ enquired Castro.

‘No.’

She didn’t say anything more. She didn’t fall into the trap of trying to underpin her denial with more words, like every typical liar.

‘We’ll see. Tomorrow I’ll see you at the station at ten. Then you’ll tell me the whole thing again.’

He hung up.

Castro hadn’t raised his voice once in the entire conversation. Ana would have preferred it if he had. She was exhausted. Her feet dragged heavily, the walk home seemed never-ending. She opened the door and walked right past the postboxes. She still had four flights to climb.