Death on a Galician Shore (19 page)

‘What’s incredible is that you believe this ghost story, too,’ replied Estevez.

‘I don’t know what to believe,’ said Caldas, taking the unlit cigarette from his mouth and drumming on his lighter.

Estevez gave him a sidelong glance. ‘Inspector,’ he warned, ‘if you’re about to spit, do me a favour and open the window a little wider.’

Caldas called the pathologist from the car. More than a decade had passed, but Barrio still remembered the recovery of the veteran seaman’s body caught up in the nets of a trawler from Vigo. It had been one of his first cases.

‘The body had been in the water almost a month,’ he said. ‘You don’t easily forget a case like that, Leo.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Caldas. ‘Do you remember how it was identified?’

‘No, but I always keep a copy of the report I send to the judge.’

‘Could you get hold of it?’

‘Is it urgent?’ asked the pathologist, and Caldas detected a hint of annoyance in his voice.

‘Were you about to leave?’

‘In a little while,’ he replied, but he sounded as if he already had his coat on. ‘Unless you need me to stay …’

‘Would you mind hanging on for twenty minutes or so?’ asked the inspector. ‘I’ve got something important to show you.’

When he hung up, Caldas opened the folder again, set aside Sousa’s photograph and unfolded the first cutting. Beneath the headline ‘Fishing Boat from Panxón Sinks near Salvora’ ran a half-page article about the shipwreck, including a photograph of rough seas at the scene of the accident and another of the boat’s port of origin. The news that the skipper of the boat was missing was emphasised in bold type.

Caldas started reading the article but by the third line he was feeling carsick. He placed the cutting back in the folder and opened the window a little wider. Breathing deeply, he leaned back and closed his eyes.

Guzman Barrio sat in his office waiting for the inspector. He’d hung his coat back on the rack.

‘Let’s see whatever it is that’s so important it couldn’t wait till tomorrow,’ he grumbled as they entered.

Caldas set the priest’s photograph of Captain Sousa down on the desk.

‘I wanted you to see this,’ he said, placing the slip of paper with the outline of the blow to Justo Castelo’s head beside the photograph. ‘Look at the club on the man’s belt. It’s narrow with a rounded end, like your drawing here, see?’

The pathologist looked closely at the
macana
.

‘Yes, they are similar.’

‘So do you think Castelo could have been hit with this?’ pressed Caldas.

‘Maybe,’ replied Barrio after a moment’s thought.

‘Any way to confirm it?’

‘We could try,’ said the pathologist. ‘You haven’t got the club itself, of course …’

Caldas shook his head.

‘Any more photos?’ asked Barrio.

‘None as clear as this one.’

The pathologist looked at the picture again and smoothed his hair with his hand.

‘Give us a couple of days, let’s see what we can do,’ he said at last, before asking, ‘Who’s the man in the photo?’

‘That’s why I called you, Guzman. It’s that fisherman whose body was found years ago in the nets of the trawler.’

‘Antonio Sousa?’

Caldas nodded.

‘What’s he got to do with all of this?’

‘He was from Panxón. Castelo was on his boat the day it sank. It’s not clear what happened.’

‘And?’

‘He’s been seen again in the village.’

‘Who?’

‘Sousa.’

‘Sousa?’ echoed the pathologist, puzzled.

‘That’s why I asked you to find the report.’

‘They think it’s his ghost,’ added Estevez, with a mocking smile quickly erased by Caldas’s reproving glance.

There was a moment’s silence, then Barrio asked Caldas, ‘Surely you don’t think so, too, do you?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I think,’ replied Caldas. ‘I just want to know how the body was identified. Just in case.’

‘It’s absurd.’

‘Absolutely. Have you got the report or not?’

Barrio motioned to a spiral-bound document.

‘Any photos?’ asked the inspector.

‘At the end.’

Caldas flicked through the pages until he found the photos taken during the recovery and autopsy of Sousa’s body. Seeing them alongside the one taken by the priest, it was hard to believe they showed the same person.

‘The face is completely decomposed,’ he said, holding a photo out to his assistant.

‘Bloody hell,’ cried Estevez in alarm. ‘Don’t show me that.’

‘Did you confirm that it was him?’ asked Caldas.

Barrio motioned towards the report.

‘So it states in there.’

‘Oh, stop it, Guzman. I’m not trying to catch you out. I just want you to tell me how you knew it was Antonio Sousa. I need to be certain that there was no mistake, that’s all.’

The pathologist took the report from him and, after leafing through it, said:

‘His own son identified the body. Is that certain enough for you?’

‘You know better than I do that you can’t rely on the relatives. His son probably could hardly look. He’d have identified anything just so as to be able to bury the body,’ said Caldas and, pointing at Sousa’s face, he added: ‘I mean, look at the state it was in.’

‘It had been in the sea for weeks. What would you expect?’

Estevez smiled, but the inspector wouldn’t give up.

‘Was a DNA test carried out?’

‘Of course not, Leo. We’re talking about more than twelve years ago.’

‘How about dental records?’

‘We didn’t check them either,’ replied Barrio. ‘We’d been waiting for the body to turn up, you know. The search had been on for weeks. Anyway, we had enough to make an identification.’ He turned the pages of the report again. ‘The clothing was what Sousa had been wearing when the boat went down, and the medallion of the Virgin of El Carmen was the same.’

‘There are thousands of fishermen with one of those around their neck.’

‘I told you, his son identified the body,’ said the pathologist, laying the report on the desk open at the page with the photos.

The inspector looked at Sousa’s decomposed face once again. ‘Just tell me one thing, Guzman. Could it have been someone else?’

‘Of course not,’ said Estevez, but Caldas ignored him. He wanted to hear it from the pathologist.

‘Could it?’ he repeated.

‘What do you want me to say, Leo?’

‘Just tell me if it’s possible.’

‘If what’s possible? That another drowned man was wearing Sousa’s clothes and his medallion and looked like him?’

‘Is it possible or not?’

‘Bloody hell, Leo …’

‘Yes or no,’ said Caldas.

Estevez reflected that even under torture the pathologist would be unable to give a definite answer. He was proved right.

Caldas took refuge behind the glass door of his office. He dropped the folder of cuttings about the sinking of the
Xurelo
and the report on the recovery of Antonio Sousa’s body on the desk, and sank into the black desk chair. He needed to recharge his batteries after an almost sleepless night and a day in Panxón. He rubbed his eyes hard and kept them closed, but the thoughts churning in his head prevented him from resting. He knew that the information gathered in the first few hours of an investigation was always the most useful. After that, instead of solidifying, traces became blurred and disappeared, and details merged into a thick fog that hid the truth and made solving a case not a matter of time, but of chance.

This was why, at the very start, he liked to enter the crime scene and examine it, trying to find the essence of the criminal that pervaded it. But in this case Caldas had nowhere to search. The clock was ticking and Justo Castelo’s boat still hadn’t turned up.

A few old fishermen had been frightened by the spectre of Captain Sousa but, judging by the lucky charms in Castelo’s pockets, they weren’t the only ones to be afraid of ghosts. And, though they denied it, El Rubio’s crewmates were frightened, too. Caldas had seen it in their eyes.

He thought of the date of the sinking daubed on El Rubio’s rowing boat and the word painted on the hull: ‘Murderers’. Murderers. Castelo hadn’t simply dismissed it as a sick joke, Caldas was sure of that. He’d immediately removed all trace of it from the boat but hadn’t been able to erase it from his mind. This was why his family
had sensed that something was worrying him. Worrying him so much that he’d stopped whistling a tune he’d been whistling for years.

The
macana
also pointed that way. The club that Sousa had won in a card game was similar in shape to the mark on Castelo’s head. Caldas didn’t believe in coincidences. And Trabazo had spoken of Sousa’s skill in handling the weapon. The pathologist thought the impact to Castelo’s head had been violent enough to knock him out and, long ago, in Newfoundland, Sousa had felled a much bigger man than Castelo with a single blow.

Caldas took another look at the photo of Sousa’s putrefied face in the pathologist’s report, and an inner voice told him that things were usually what they seemed.

If Sousa was alive, if he hadn’t drowned when the boat sank, why had he waited so long to settle scores? If, as the report stated, he’d died over a decade ago, was it possible that someone was avenging the death of the skipper of the
Xurelo
? And, if so, what had prompted it now, when time should have healed the wounds?

Trabazo had jotted down the telephone number of Sousa’s son – who’d left Panxón because of all the rumours – on a slip of paper. Caldas took it from his pocket and picked up the phone, but hung up again almost immediately. He had no idea how to handle the call. What could he say? Was he going to make an accusation, or ask a son who had seen what he believed to be his father’s corpse whether the man was still alive?

Caldas thought of his own father. He’d missed their lunch and hadn’t managed to get to the hospital that afternoon either. He looked at his watch and wondered if his father was still in town. He dialled his mobile number – if he hadn’t gone back to the estate yet, maybe they could meet for a drink.

‘You’re back in Vigo?’ said his father when he answered.

‘I’ve just got here,’ Caldas lied. ‘Are you still around?’

‘No, no, I’m back home. There’s more pruning to do tomorrow so I want an early start. And I needed to breathe. I’d been in town since late morning.’

First one to the chin.

‘Sorry about that.’

‘Don’t worry. I know you saw Trabazo. How did you find him?’

‘Not bad. How’s Uncle Alberto doing?’

‘He’s OK …’

‘Right,’ said Caldas tersely. ‘Will you be visiting him tomorrow?’

‘I go in every day.’

Second one to the cheek.

‘So maybe I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said, about to hang up.

‘Just one thing, Leo.’

‘What’s that?’

Caldas prepared himself for a third blow.

‘Do you remember what the brother of Basilio, who ran the drugstore, was called?’

‘The one who was a bit dim?’

‘That’s the one. I’ve been trying to think of his name all day.’

‘No idea.’

After speaking to his father, he called Clara Barcia. She told him they’d started examining Justo Castelo’s auxiliary boat that afternoon.

‘They didn’t lie to you, Inspector. It’s very faint, but there does seem to be a date on there.’

‘Do you know what it is?’

‘The day is 20 December,’ said Barcia. ‘But we still can’t make out if the year is 1995 or 1996.’

‘Ninety-six,’ said Caldas, recalling the year of the sinking of the
Xurelo
. ‘Anything else?’

‘Nothing legible. It’s a really old boat and it’s been repainted quite a few times. There were lots of marks but they could have been anything.’

‘What about the cable ties?’

‘Inspector, I left you a summary of all the information. Haven’t you read it?’

‘In my office?’ he asked, looking around.

‘On your desk,’ said Barcia, before continuing: ‘We couldn’t find green ties anywhere. They may be available abroad but they don’t ever seem to have been sold here.’

Caldas rummaged among the papers on his desk. He could find any document in the apparent chaos with his eyes closed, but only if he’d put it there himself.

‘Got it, Clara,’ he said, retrieving the report from a pile.

He glanced through it. She’d been as thorough as ever.

He left his office, with the folder of press cuttings collected by Don Fernando under his arm, together with the report on Sousa’s corpse and the summary drawn up by Clara Barcia.

He found Estevez in the toilets. He had his coat on and was leaning over the basin washing his face.

Caldas thought he could probably do with a splash of cold water himself to clear his head.

‘How about a glass of wine at the Eligio?’ he said from the door. It had been a long day. They deserved a drink.

‘Not today, boss.’

‘Not even one? It’s only eight o’clock.’

‘Give me a break, boss,’ said Estevez, smoothing his hair with dampened hands. ‘I’m meeting someone.’

‘Meeting someone?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘Right.’

Estevez glanced at him in the mirror. ‘Got a problem with that?’

‘No, no, fine,’ stammered Caldas and closed the door behind him.

It had rained heavily again by the time he got to the Eligio. The cast-iron stove was lit and several tables were occupied. Caldas hung his raincoat on the rack and went over to the empty bar. Behind him he could hear the academics, in their usual place, and Carlos’s deep voice at a table at the back.

‘Hey, Leo!’ one of the academics called out. ‘We were just talking about your show yesterday.’

Caldas didn’t try to set them right – they thought
Patrolling the Waves
was his show and that was that.

‘What’s that tune you play while you’re thinking?’

He nearly turned around and left.

‘What was that?’

The man who’d asked about the tune must have noticed his annoyance because he added, raising both hands, ‘We think it’s great. If music helps you concentrate …’

‘What piece is it?’ asked another.