The Whispering City (43 page)

‘Did you know they want to put a giant thermometer at the bottom of Portal del Ángel Street? It’ll be the largest thermometer in the world, more than twenty metres high. It’ll go along the entire front of Cottet Optician’s, and will work with lights. Each degree of temperature is a red lamp that lights up.’

Sanvisens acknowledged receipt of the information with a nod of his head.

They continued in silence, dodging passers-by and beggars, more common in that part of town with its shops and churches. They took Los Arcos Street on the left, which led them to the cathedral square. Carlos filled the silence with recollections of his old aversion to the facade of Barcelona’s cathedral, its neo-Gothic arches, its neo-Gothic columns, all fake. They headed towards it.

The beggars became more numerous. The entrance was completely surrounded. He counted and classified them so that he could go past them without feeling as afflicted. Seven in total. Three old women swathed in clothes from head to toe, a man with only one hand, a man without legs, a girl and an ambiguous bundle coiled over itself and leaning against a wall.

Inside, the air was heavy with wax, incense and the sweat of the faithful who’d filed out only ten minutes earlier. He trailed Sanvisens, passing several chapels on their right. In the middle of the nave Sanvisens pointed him to a pew. They sat down. The rest of the people remaining in the cathedral were a fair distance off, absorbed in their devotions. No one turned to look at them.

‘Why did you bring me here?’

‘So I could talk to you,’ he responded in a whisper.

‘We could have talked on the street.’

‘But I want you to tell me the truth,’ he replied, as his gaze flickered around the cathedral nave.
You wouldn’t lie to me here, would you?
said his movements.

Sanvisens was projecting his ethical code onto others, which was, in Carlos’s opinion, sometimes his greatest defect or, in this case, his greatest virtue.

‘Carlos, have you interfered in any way in the Sobrerroca case?’

He wasn’t looking at him; he kept his eyes straight ahead, and his expression left no room for doubt: he knew something, and there was no point in lying to him. He would never forgive him for it.

‘I’ve just made a few enquiries, asked some questions…’

‘What questions? Who did you ask?’

Sanvisens sat bolt upright on the bench and, although he was muttering, his voice had an imperative, curt tone. Carlos leaned closer and began his confession, in a reedy whisper: ‘The truth is, one time I followed Ana Martí and saw her talking to a man in the Ciudadela. It was after she’d received some letter that had got her all wound up.’

‘You spied on a colleague?’

‘I’m not proud of it, if that’s what you want to hear. But it would only have amounted to a less than glorious moment in my career if I hadn’t happened to recognise the same man on a slab in the Montjuïc morgue a few days later.’

‘Why didn’t you come to me?’

‘Because you would have thought I was jealous of that girl.’

‘Would I have been wrong?’

Carlos was silent.

‘Who did you go to with your questions?’

Belda leaned even closer to Sanvisens. His tone was contrite. ‘I called a contact I have in the police force.’

‘Who?’

‘It’s just that —’

‘Who?’ shouted Sanvisens.

Several people turned to look. One of them got up, surely on her way to tell a priest.

‘Commissioner Goyanes, of the CIB.’

‘To tell him what?’

‘That I knew the dead guy at the morgue because I’d seen him once, talking to somebody who worked at the paper, the one who was writing the articles about the case.’

‘Why? To what end? Are you aware that you’ve put Ana Martí in danger? Do you know they came looking for her at the office and that, if it weren’t for the porter, they would have taken her on one of their walks?’

‘The retarded bloke?’

‘That’s the one. He took care of the thugs all on his own. Those guys were policemen.’

They both knew what that meant: that someday, when they were least expecting it, the police would be lying in wait for them around a corner or in a doorway.

‘Why did you do it, Carlos?’

At that moment, Carlos was unable to give a reason beyond his professional spite and how unbearable he found the presence of his mentor Andreu Martí’s daughter in the newsroom. His silence led Sanvisens to a different conclusion. He turned to him with a forlorn expression, and when he spoke, his voice was full of sorrow: ‘Are you an informer, Carlos?’

Belda rubbed his forehead with his hand several times before saying, ‘No, I’m not an informer. I’m just an imbecile.’

59

‘Isidro.’

‘What is it?’

‘Jesus, you’re in some mood,’ chided Manzaneque before getting to what had brought him to his colleague’s office. ‘We’ve got a dead lady.’

‘Well, how about that! How original! A dead lady! It’s not even nine and we’ve already got our first stiff. Where?’

‘In the Ensanche, on the Rambla de Cataluña. Come on, let’s go.’

They left the office and headed towards the car. No words were exchanged, but it was clear that Manzaneque was going to drive. They got in and drove off.

‘Want a smoke?’

Manzaneque held out a packet he pulled from his shirt pocket without taking his eyes off the traffic. Bisonte brand.

‘Black tobacco? No thanks.’

‘You smoke blonde now? Are you getting queer on me?’

‘I’m trying to give it up.’

He couldn’t stand how his wife moved her face away involuntarily when he approached to kiss her. But he wasn’t going to tell that to Manzaneque, who continued with his mocking, ‘Oh, fine. I get it. Black, blonde, then you start with menthols and once you end up using a cigarette holder like a showgirl on the Paralelo, your life’s complete.’

‘Fuck off!’

‘Aren’t we touchy! It’s great to see how much you’re enjoying your promotion. If they ever make you Commissioner, you’ll probably blow your brains out with happiness.’

He couldn’t explain to Manzaneque – he couldn’t explain it to anyone – but his euphoria over his promotion to First Class Inspector had been snuffed out. Ana Martí’s visit hadn’t been a bucket of cold water, but it had prompted an insidious drip-drip in his mind that had eventually extinguished his enthusiasm. The solution to the Sobrerroca case was a fraud; his promotion, nothing more than a bribe, a juicy bit of meat to keep the dog from barking. He wouldn’t bark, he wasn’t that stupid, but he couldn’t stop growling at everyone, starting with Manzaneque.

They reached the Rambla de Cataluña. As the car approached the huddle of onlookers that had formed in the street, Isidro’s heart shrank. He knew the building; he had been there the day before only to confirm that Beatriz Noguer hadn’t waited for him, that she’d fled.

Manzaneque whistled to get the crowd to part and drove the car up on the central pavement. When they climbed out of the vehicle, everyone fell silent. That was the immediate effect of the policemen’s presence.

The officer who was keeping the nosy parkers out of the house told them that the dead woman had been found in the first-floor flat by the doorman’s son. Isidro glanced at the boy, about eleven years old, who was watching him fearfully from a stool inside the doorman’s cubbyhole. Beside him stood a man in dark blue overalls, who put a hand on the boy’s shoulder in a protective gesture that identified him as his father. Seeing the policeman’s gaze on him, the man began to speak.

‘I sent the boy up to deliver a letter from abroad, from England, that had just arrived. The boy collects stamps, and Señora Noguer always lets him have them. He knocked on the door and then he realised that it wasn’t closed and went in.’

‘But I didn’t touch a thing!’

He didn’t need to hear any more.

Isidro went upstairs without urgency. If Beatriz Noguer was dead, there was no reason to rush.

Another policeman was posted in front of the partly open door to the flat to keep out the indiscreet looks of the fellow residents gathered on the landing. Just like at a wake, there was a murmur of voices beneath which the occasional nervous giggle could be heard. And just like at a wake, the appearance of a new person shut down all the voices at once, and one or two seconds later someone let out a sob.

Isidro entered the flat and closed the door behind him.

He oriented himself by the voices of the officers he heard to his right. Following them, he found the kitchen. He went in. A woman’s legs covered in dark stockings stuck out from behind a table. On the kitchen floor, potatoes and vegetables had scattered. The first red stain that caught his eye wasn’t blood but a tomato someone had stepped on. The woman who lay on the floor, face down, her head twisted to the left in a puddle of blood, was not Beatriz Noguer. She was a young woman.

‘It’s the maid, Encarnación Rodríguez Alarcón,’ said the officer who was inspecting the kitchen.

Isidro carefully approached the area where the woman’s head was, dodging the vegetables that had fallen onto the floor, as well as the dark pool of dried blood around her head. He knelt down and touched her face. It was cold and bore dark patches that weren’t from the blows that’d killed her, indicating that she had been dead for more than twelve hours. She must have been murdered a few hours after he had knocked on the door in vain. It seems they had surprised her in the kitchen as she returned loaded down with groceries. That meant that her killer had entered the house before she did. Was whoever it was there when he rang the bell? He knew it was a useless speculation that served only to accentuate the crushing feeling of failure that now seized him.

‘Found anything suspicious in the flat?’ he asked the officer.

‘Everything is suspicious, because the whole place has been turned upside down. Have a look for yourself, if you want.’

He left the room and went through the flat. They had emptied every drawer in the house, from the dresser where the owner had kept her clothes to the sideboard with napkins and silverware. But where they had really vented their anger was in the room that must have been her study. The shelves were empty, books heaped open on the floor, the drawers had been ripped from the desk and their contents scattered on a rug, of which only a small triangle could be seen under all the paper. He was beginning to understand that it wasn’t a break-in; that they had been looking for the owner of the flat. In reality, they wanted something that she had in her flat or that they thought was there. The letters. That damn Ana Martí hadn’t given him the copies! Why? And where was Beatriz Noguer? Had she fled, or had she been kidnapped? Again the big question: why? The fact that they’d searched with such determination might mean that they hadn’t found Beatriz Noguer and so they couldn’t get what they were looking for out of her. Whatever it was, it was so important that they had killed that poor maid over it and – he now saw clearly – the man Ana Martí had told him was Abel Mendoza. What did Mariona Sobrerroca have to do with all this? Ana Martí had told him that Mendoza was her lover. Why had they been bumped off? Seeing the way the killers had gone through the flat, it was clear they were looking for papers. What did Señora Sobrerroca’s letters have in them that unleashed such violence? Who was in a position to exert such violence?

He heard voices at the front door. He recognised that of Coroner Soldevila, who was coming to remove the body. He went back to the kitchen to inspect the crime scene once more, making sure that the officers had taken note of everything important and that they had taken all the necessary photos.

‘Castro! This is an extremely unappetising scene! And forgive the remark, it’s in poor taste. What do we have here?’

‘It seems to be a break-in, Coroner.’

‘And the poor girl, in the wrong place at the wrong time, is that it?’

‘Unfortunately.’

It was the only time that morning that he didn’t lie or hide information from Coroner Soldevila. Since Isidro was known to be a man of few words, no one found it strange that he remained almost mute while the body was removed. When Manzaneque came upstairs after interrogating the doorman and his son, Isidro asked him for a cigarette.

‘Your good intentions don’t last long, son,’ he said, pulling out the packet of Bisonte.

By this time, Soldevila was preparing to leave the flat.

‘Congratulations, Castro. I heard about your promotion.’

‘Be careful, sir, you don’t know how badly he takes good news. If one more person congratulates him, he’s going to bite someone’s head off,’ said Manzaneque, alluding to the painful grimace that had appeared on Isidro’s face on hearing the coroner’s congratulations.

‘Well, I don’t understand why,’ Soldevila commented. ‘You should be very proud.’

Isidro almost stalked off before he’d finished his sentence. He felt a lot of things: above all, fear at what could happen to Ana Martí and Beatriz Noguer. And he felt so many things in addition to fear: concern, rage, impotence… Everything but pride.

In the car on the way back, Manzaneque went on with his speculations but received only tepid comments in response.

‘In my opinion, they killed the girl because she surprised them in the house.’

‘That’s what I think.’

‘Something must have gone wrong… these gangs that burgle flats observe the habits of the people who live there and, when they have them well studied, they break into their houses when they’re all out. They only steal things that they can get out without attracting attention to themselves: jewellery, money, gold or silver cutlery, watches…’

‘The doorman didn’t see a thing.’

‘Doormen are easily distracted,’ replied Manzaneque. ‘One of the accomplices makes a scene on the street and the doorman’s out there, seeing what’s going on.’

‘Useless. They’re all useless.’