Death on a Galician Shore (12 page)

‘I’m back,’ said Estevez behind him.

‘How did you get on with the fishermen on the jetty?’ Caldas asked, without turning round.

‘OK.’

‘Did you get anything out of them?’

Caldas took his own keys from his pocket and selected one of the smaller ones.

‘You’re not going to believe this, Inspector. Those two think the same as the old boy: Castelo committed suicide because that captain drove him to it.’

‘Captain Sousa?’ asked Caldas, trying the key in the lock.

‘Exactly. What do you think?’

Caldas didn’t reply. He chose another key.

‘They claimed Castelo had received messages from the captain,’ added Estevez.

‘Shit,’ muttered the inspector. The key had slid easily into the lock but he couldn’t turn it. ‘Did they say what kind of message?’

‘They said Castelo had found graffiti on his rowing boat one morning, and that he’d gone nuts when he saw it.’

‘What did it say?’ asked Caldas.

‘They claim they didn’t read it.’

Caldas turned towards his assistant. ‘You expect me to believe that those fishermen saw something on a rowing boat on the slipway and didn’t go and take a look …’

‘I don’t expect anything, Inspector. It’s what they said. Apparently El Rubio took the boat straight off to a ship’s carpenter to have the graffiti removed.’

Gripping the key with white knuckles, the veins in his neck bulging from the effort, Caldas turned.

‘So how do they know it was a message from Captain Sousa?’

Estevez shrugged. ‘That’s what I asked, but I didn’t really get what they answered.’

‘Right,’ said Caldas, giving up on the key. ‘Let’s see if you can open this damn door.’

Estevez stepped back, swung his weight for momentum and kicked the door.

‘Bloody hell, Rafa!’ the inspector exclaimed, only just able to get out of the way.

‘I thought you wanted it opened?’

Not only had Estevez opened it, he’d kicked it off one of its hinges. The inspector looked at the broken door, sighed and moved it aside as if it were a curtain.

He went inside the shed and, as Alicia Castelo had warned, found it full of junk. A dusty motorbike chassis was propped against one wall beside the shell of an old lawnmower. On a table, in a jumble of parts and tools, lay several dismantled boat engines.

‘Do you know where that ship’s carpenter is?’ he asked, re-emerging on to the patio.

‘There,’ replied Estevez, pointing towards one side of the patio. ‘He works at the yacht club.’

Caldas looked at Estevez’s extended finger, then at the place he was indicating. Beyond the wall, between two houses, he saw a tiny patch of sea. How the hell did Estevez find his bearings like that?

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘I didn’t speak to anyone else, boss. Getting spat at twice in under an hour is quite enough.’

‘Twice?’

Estevez nodded. ‘I only had to mention that dead captain and bam!’ he said. ‘I came this close to chucking the fisherman into the water with a hook through his lip.’

The fish market was closed and only the pungent smell of the dustbins at the entrance betrayed the morning’s business. Up ahead, an old man stopped to read Justo Castelo’s death notice. He perched a pair of glasses on his nose and tilted his head back to see through the lenses. Caldas smiled. For years his father had peered at him over his glasses. They had been thick and metal-rimmed, quite unlike the light pair hanging on a cord around the neck of the man reading the death notice. He had removed them only at night or when cleaning them, first misting them with his warm breath and then wiping them with a white handkerchief which he kept in his right-hand trouser pocket. He had long ago replaced them with a pair of bifocals, but Caldas could still clearly remember the way he squinted as he cleaned the old ones, and the red mark left by the frames, a dent that turned the end of his nose into a white blob.

The policemen walked past the old man and went through the gate to the yacht club. On the left, steps led up to the clubhouse. Like many other yacht clubs it had been built to resemble a ship, with a curved outline and round windows like portholes on the first floor. Across the courtyard stood the large shed that served as a boathouse. Through the open door, which was painted white and blue like the rest of the place, they could see the shapes of sailing boats beneath canvas covers.

‘Are you sure there’s a carpenter here?’ Caldas asked Estevez, looking around as they mounted the steps to the building resembling a ship.

‘So I was led to believe.’

A few seconds later they returned to the courtyard accompanied by a man who pointed to a sliding door at one end of the boathouse.

They slid it open and found a smallish workshop, lit by fluorescent tubes hanging from the ceiling and separated by a partition from the rest of the building. A carpenter’s bench with two lathes fixed to it ran down the whole of one wall. Beside small boards all cut to the same size, the toothed blade of a circular saw protruded from a slot.

By the door, beside the ribs of a boat in the making, a grey cat lay dozing. It opened its eyes for a moment, looked at them with indifference and then curled itself tighter.

Estevez nodded towards the back of the workshop and, by the only window, Caldas made out the figure of the carpenter. He was sitting on a stool with his back to them, leaning over a small boat.

As they advanced through the workshop, avoiding a boat with a hole in its hull, the smell of the sea gave way to the odours of wood, glue and paint.

Caldas and Estevez stood behind the man leaning over the little boat, an old
gamela
that, despite having been thoroughly rubbed down, still retained a hint of blue from an original coat of paint. The carpenter reached into a bag and extracted a handful of fibres, remnants of old rope, which he inserted into the seam between two planks. He pressed the frayed bundle first with his fingers, then with a kind of chisel, which he tapped with a wooden mallet – one light tap followed by two or three harder taps, like drum rolls.

‘What’s he doing?’ whispered Estevez.

‘Caulking the boat,’ replied the inspector quietly.

This explanation did not satisfy Estevez, who raised his eyebrows theatrically.

‘Oakum is pushed between the planks and tamped down so there are no gaps for water to leak in through,’ said the inspector. ‘Then it needs a coat of pitch to protect the wood.’

The carpenter stopped hammering and turned slightly towards them.

‘That’s more or less it, isn’t it?’ Caldas asked him.

The carpenter bent over the boat again.

‘More or less, though we don’t treat the wood with pitch any more,’ he said, pressing more oakum into a seam before striking it with the
mallet from different angles. ‘You needed to know what you were doing when applying it, because if it was too soft it melted and if it was too hard it ended up cracking off. So now we use a vegetable tar.’

‘Right.’

Caldas noticed that several fingers were missing on his right hand, the one he was holding the mallet with, and instinctively his eyes sought the circular saw on the bench. He wondered if it had been responsible for the injury. Then he turned back towards the carpenter, who continued pressing oakum into the seam until it was sealed. When he’d finished, he put his tools down on the floor and got to his feet.

‘Did you want something?’

‘I’m Inspector Caldas,’ he said, resisting the urge to hold out his hand. ‘And this is Officer Estevez. We’re from Police Headquarters in Vigo. Do you have a moment?’

The carpenter nodded. His work clothes were as paint-spattered as the stool on which he’d sat. Medium height and thin, he had dark hair and a thick, untidy reddish beard, which made it hard to judge his age. Too young at any rate, thought Caldas, to have lost three fingers.

‘How can I help you?’

The cat that had been dozing at the door suddenly appeared around the carpenter’s legs and started rubbing against them.

Caldas thought of the brown dog greeting his father the previous evening. Though his father had claimed it wasn’t his, the dog had howled and leaped with such joy on seeing him that Caldas had feared it would pee from excitement.

‘Is it yours?’ he asked, gesturing towards the cat.

‘Of course,’ replied the carpenter.

‘Right,’ said Caldas, staring at the creature, which was still rubbing against its owner’s trousers.

‘Have you come about the cat?’ asked the carpenter, as puzzled as Estevez by the inspector’s interest.

‘No, no, we want to speak to you,’ said Caldas, feeling foolish.

‘It’s about Justo Castelo. El Rubio,’ added Estevez, getting to the point.

‘You knew him, didn’t you?’ asked the inspector.

The carpenter nodded and with his maimed hand indicated the half-built boat by the entrance.

‘That boat was for El Rubio,’ he said.

The inspector looked at the boat, his assistant looked at the hand.

‘When did he order it?’ asked Caldas.

‘It must have been a couple of months ago. He wasn’t in a hurry because he was collecting the parts to build the engine himself. I had other more urgent jobs but at odd times, well … If I’d known, I wouldn’t have started on it.’

‘Of course not,’ said Caldas. ‘I expect you spoke to him quite a bit during that time?’

‘Not really, Inspector. We spoke when he placed the order and a few times after that. He was a quiet guy.’

Caldas thought the carpenter didn’t seem too chatty himself.

‘When was the last time you saw him?’

‘El Rubio? He dropped in on Saturday at midday. But we didn’t say a word to each other. He arrived, had a quick look at the boat, waved at me from the door and left. As I said, he wasn’t the kind to stop and chat.’

Caldas decided to stop beating about the bush.

‘We’ve been told that recently Castelo got you to remove some graffiti from his boat,’ he said, and noticed the carpenter’s expression change.

The carpenter ran his mutilated hand through his hair and Estevez’s eyes followed it as if magnetised.

‘Is that right?’ Caldas pressed him.

‘Not quite. El Rubio wheeled the rowing boat here on his trailer and asked for sandpaper to rub down the wood and then give it a coat of paint. He removed the graffiti himself.’

‘Did you see what it said?’

‘On the boat?’

Estevez cleared his throat and Caldas gave him a warning look.

‘Yes,’ said the inspector. ‘Did you read it?’

‘More or less.’

‘More or less?’

‘It was a few weeks ago,’ said the carpenter apologetically.

‘Try to remember,’ urged the inspector.

The carpenter looked down at the cat, which was still twining itself around his legs.

‘It was a date.’

‘Can you remember it?’ Caldas asked.

The man again passed his maimed hand over his hair.

‘The twentieth of December 1996,’ he said. ‘In figures: 20/12/96.’

It couldn’t be a coincidence. The twentieth of December was the day the
Xurelo
had foundered. El Rubio and the other crewmembers had survived, but it was the date of Captain Sousa’s death.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked, and the carpenter replied with a small nod.

Caldas recalled that the fishermen Estevez had spoken to had mentioned a threatening message supposedly written by Captain Sousa on the rowing boat. Could a date alone constitute a warning? Numbers daubed on a boat would mean something to someone like Castelo, who had that tragic winter’s night branded on his memory, but after all this time Caldas wasn’t sure the other villagers would see them as a threat.

There had to be something else, so he decided to nudge the carpenter towards the right path.

‘That date wasn’t the only thing painted on the boat, was it?’

The carpenter looked straight into the inspector’s eyes, but his beard prevented Caldas from fully reading his expression.

‘What else was there?’ he pressed. ‘A sentence?’

‘I only saw it for a split second,’ replied the carpenter, glancing towards the closed door of the workshop.

‘No one will know we’ve spoken to you about this,’ Caldas assured him. ‘Anyway, I get the feeling you weren’t the only person who saw what was painted on the boat that morning.’

The man thought for a moment longer before finally muttering: ‘It was one word.’

‘Just one?’

The carpenter nodded, again looking down.

‘Do you remember what it was?’ asked Caldas, already knowing the answer. If he remembered the date painted on the boat so clearly, he couldn’t have forgotten the word that went with it.

‘“Murderers”,’ said the carpenter, sighing as if a weight were being lifted from him.

‘“Murderers”?’ asked Caldas.

The carpenter nodded slightly.

‘“Murderers” in the plural?’ pressed the inspector.

The man nodded again.

‘I didn’t tell you anything,’ he said.

As they left the carpenter’s workshop they were once again overwhelmed by the smell of the tide, which was now rising.

‘Who the hell did you think it belonged to?’ asked Estevez.

‘What?’

‘The cat, of course. Who did you imagine its owner was?’

‘I don’t know,’ mumbled Caldas, walking on. ‘It could have belonged to anyone.’

He stopped at the door to the Refugio del Pescador and glanced inside. There were a few customers leaning on the bar, while another was at a table reading a newspaper. Caldas looked at his watch and clicked his tongue. José Arias would be sleeping by now. The inspector needed to speak to him, but he’d have to wait a few hours. He crossed the street to the car and looked out at the boats moored in the harbour. The boys from Forensics hadn’t yet come to collect Justo Castelo’s rowing boat to examine it.

‘Incredible how someone can work like that, isn’t it?’ remarked Estevez, joining him.

‘Like what?’

Estevez pressed three fingers of his right hand against his palm.

‘He had almost three whole fingers missing. Didn’t you notice?’

‘Oh, yes, right,’ replied Caldas absently.

His gaze was fixed on the boats and his thoughts were very far from the carpenter’s hand.