Death on a Galician Shore (7 page)

‘Clean,’ said the doctor succinctly, confirming what Alicia Castelo had said.

Once he’d rung off, Caldas ate the veal with chickpeas, which had stayed warm in the earthenware dish. Carlos came over with a bottle
of white wine and an empty glass. He sat down, poured himself a glass and refilled the inspector’s.

‘Pretty good, wasn’t it?’ he said, lighting a cigarette and indicating the dish, which the inspector had scraped clean.

‘Delicious,’ replied Caldas. Turning towards the table where the academics were deep in conversation, he asked: ‘Are they still on about the breathalyser man?’

‘No, they’ve moved on to something else,’ said Carlos with a smile.

Caldas reflected aloud: ‘Why would someone carry a sachet of salt around in their pocket?’

Carlos thought for a moment, resting his chin on his fist. Caldas was tempted to start humming the jingle Losada had started playing on the show while he was thinking.

‘I don’t know,’ said Carlos at last, pouring more wine. ‘Why would they?’

‘I don’t know either, Carlos. It wasn’t a riddle.’

‘So why do you ask?’

‘A client,’ said the inspector laconically. ‘He had a little bag of salt in his pocket.’

‘Well, I haven’t got a clue.’

They sat on for a few minutes at the back table of the Eligio, smoking and sipping their wine in companionable silence.

When he’d finished his cigarette, Caldas paid for the meal and went home.

By the time the alarm rang at six thirty on Tuesday morning, Caldas had been awake for a long while, lying in bed in the dark, listening to the rain dripping from the eaves and splashing on to the courtyard below. The Eligio’s food was really good, but he’d spent all night tossing and turning, having bad dreams and getting up for water from the kitchen. As he headed for the shower, he swore he’d never order chickpeas again after midday.

Uncle Alberto’s green face mask, his father and the Book of Idiots had filled his mind during his many wakeful moments. And, throughout, Alba’s pendant had been in his thoughts, two metal balls that produced a jingling he now missed terribly. One night she’d told him that the sound was calming to babies in the womb, and Caldas had simply turned over. Only after it was gone did he realise it had soothed him, too.

His thoughts also gravitated to the drowned fisherman, the blows to his blond head and the green plastic cable tie scoring the flesh of his wrists.

The pathologist supposed that the fisherman had, first, received a blow to the back of the head. He’d been struck with a metal object with a rounded end so violently that it had knocked him out. Then, once he was unconscious, his hands had been tied and he’d been thrown overboard.

But there was something in this reconstruction that didn’t quite fit: Justo Castelo had apparently set out in his boat alone. No matter how much he tried, Caldas couldn’t see how Castelo could have been
taken by surprise by someone approaching in another boat. Perhaps an attacker had lain hidden on deck, among the traps, waiting for a chance to jump the fisherman. But Castelo had sailed on a wet Sunday morning when he should have been having a day off. How could the murderer have known that he would be going out?

It was still dark when the lights of Estevez’s car appeared outside Caldas’s apartment block.

‘Morning,’ said the inspector as he opened the car door.

‘Yeah, great,’ grumbled Estevez, staring at the rain, soon to turn into a downpour, spattering the windscreen.

‘Do you know how to get to Panxón?’ Caldas asked, leaning back in the passenger seat and opening the window a crack.

Estevez shot him a look of contempt, before pulling out and setting off down the hill. They reached the fishing port as the working day was coming to an end and the rest of the city was only just waking up. The last few lorries were lined up on the docks, impatient to receive their cargoes of fish and depart. Across the road, at the counter of the Kiosko de las Almas Perdidas, fishermen and dockers were warming their bellies and trading gossip before going home to bed. Meanwhile, flocks of gulls hovered overhead, noisily demanding food.

They drove on, leaving the fishing port behind and passing the shipyards, where the glow of welding illuminated the bowels of ships under construction.

The inspector closed his eyes and Estevez switched on the radio, which was broadcasting a local news bulletin. There was no mention of the drowned fisherman, only a weather forecast and a report on the increasing number of pedestrians run over in the streets of the city.

‘Well, I haven’t run anyone over for ages,’ said Estevez. ‘The last time was in Zaragoza, but that was over three years ago.’

Caldas’s eyes sprang open.

‘Hope you don’t miss it,’ he said.

‘Of course not.’

‘Well, good. While you’re working for me I forbid you to run anyone over.’

*

They followed the coast until they turned on to the ring road, which was almost empty that early in the morning, and then took the coast road out of Vigo.

The road kept the
ria
– the estuary – to the right and ran past all the small ports along the coast. The tarmac had been laid over the rails of a tram, which an enlightened mayor had decided to pension off decades earlier, replacing electric trams with modern diesel-powered buses.

They passed the island of Toralla, with its skyscraper guiding ships in the darkness like a lighthouse, and drove on until a black shape loomed up over the sea. Beyond the mountain of Monteferro lay Panxón, the end of the journey.

When they reached Panxón, just before seven fifteen by the inspector’s watch, they found the fish market closed with no signs of activity.

‘Are you sure we needed to arrive this early?’ muttered Estevez, looking around. ‘The place is deserted.’

Caldas didn’t reply. It was the third time his assistant had complained about the same thing and, if Estevez had got it into his head that they’d arrived too early, nothing would make him change his mind. He seemed to be right, though: there wasn’t a soul about.

The market stood in a dead-end street which led to a small yacht club; houses ran down to the right and the sea was on the left. Beyond, stretched the stone jetty that protected the harbour.

‘Someone’ll turn up soon,’ said the inspector. ‘Pull up over there.’

Estevez drove forward and parked facing the sea. It was still raining so they stayed in the car, with the wipers on and headlights off, staring out at the few boats slumbering in the harbour.

There were no floating docks in Panxón and vessels were moored to buoys fastened by chains to concrete blocks sunk on the sea floor. They were mostly
gamelas
, the shallow wooden boats used in and around the estuaries of that part of the Galician coast, and other small fishing boats, though the occasional mast was just visible in the darkness.

Caldas recalled that, in summer, when the water was crowded with motor boats and yachts, a boy in a dinghy shuttled people out to their boats and back to dry land. But now, in the rain, many buoys swayed empty, bereft until summer, when holidaymakers would once again moor their leisure craft to them.

Opposite the market building, a stone slipway ran down from the street to the water’s edge. Near the top, by the parked cars, a few wooden boats lay beyond the reach of high tide.

Past the slipway, the beach stretched away to the lower slopes of Monte Lourido, forming an immense arc broken only by a creek that flowed into the sea, dividing the beach in two.

Monteferro and the Estelas Islands provided the harbour in Panxón with natural shelter. The beach there was protected and calm, but as it left the village it became exposed, so open to the Atlantic that old seafarers claimed that, sailing west in a straight line, America was the first obstacle one reached. For this reason, the stretch of sand beyond the creek was no longer called the Playa de Panxón but the Playa America.

There, away from the lights of the village and the street lamps of the promenade, the outline of the coast was only distinguishable by the white trail of foam from waves breaking on the shore.

Caldas remembered one August when they’d come here often. If the tide was out, Alba would walk the entire length of the beach, at the water’s edge, insisting on placing a hand on the wall at either end, as if the walk were not complete unless she did so. He went with her, but stopped before reaching either end, defeated by the seaweed that covered the damp sand near the wall of the Playa America, and the seashells that scraped the soles of his bare feet by the slipway in Panxón.

Caldas was surprised to see how many other visitors shared Alba’s quaint insistence on touching both walls, as if they thought their prints would remain on the stone for ever.

‘Are you sure it’s a market day, boss?’ grumbled Estevez after a few minutes, bringing the inspector back from summer walks to a wet autumn morning.

Looking around the empty harbour, Caldas suddenly had his own doubts. What if the market was closed for the day out of respect for the drowned man? It had only just occurred to him, but now it seemed obvious that a small place like Panxón would cease trading when one of its fishermen died.

‘Of course I am,’ he replied, sinking into his seat. He tried to find a convincing excuse to give his assistant but ruled each one out as it came to him. He had just resigned himself to enduring Estevez’s
complaints all the way back to Vigo when, almost simultaneously, two lights doubled the jetty and entered the harbour.

The first boat switched off its engine as it approached a buoy where a small wooden rowing boat was moored. The fisherman on board leaned over the gunwale and plunged a boat hook into the water to retrieve a rope.

A lightbulb hanging like an oil lamp over the deck illuminated the man’s wizened features. A few wisps of white hair protruded from the dark cap he wore to ward off the cold and rain.

Caldas remembered a crime novel by a French writer that Alba had given him a couple of years before. He’d forgotten the plot but remembered one of the characters, Joss, a former sailor who earned his living as a town crier in a Paris square. He read out the messages given him by local residents and, after each one, recounted the tale of a shipwreck. He’d describe the boat and the conditions at sea, and people held their breath as they waited to hear the number of victims. Caldas liked to imagine the sigh of relief from Joss’s audience when he concluded: ‘No dead or missing.’

After mooring the boat to the buoy, the fisherman began emptying the contents of his traps into a basket to transfer his overnight catch to dry land. The same operation was taking place in the other returning boat.

Seagulls wheeled above them and, through the open car window, the inspector could hear their cries as they clamoured for fish, and smell the pungent odour of low tide.

‘His name’s Ernesto Hermida,’ said Estevez.

‘The old man?’ asked Caldas.

‘No, the seagull,’ muttered Estevez. ‘What a question.’

Caldas smiled and watched the fisherman work. As he cleared out the traps, he placed them in order so as to make it easier to set them the following day. When he’d emptied the last one, he turned off the light and the boat was shrouded in darkness.

‘Well?’ asked Estevez.

‘Well what?’ said Caldas, wondering what his assistant meant.

Estevez indicated the old man’s boat with a flourish.

‘What now?’ he asked.

Caldas looked at him out of the corner of his eye.

‘Did you think he was going to let off fireworks at the end?’

‘Bloody hell, of course not,’ Estevez replied. ‘But if he leaves the boat tied to the buoy, how is this Hermida going to get here? Swim?’

‘Ah,’ shrugged the inspector. There was no sign of the boy who ferried holidaymakers to and from their boats, or of his dinghy. ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

They next saw Ernesto Hermida rowing towards the slipway in the little wooden boat that had been moored to the buoy. A woman who looked as old as him was waiting by the water’s edge, standing on the dark stone exposed by the tide. She wore a white apron over her clothes and held up a black umbrella against the rain. Some of the seagulls had settled on the slipway and stood around her.

As he drew level with her, the fisherman handed her the basket containing his catch. The woman took it from him with difficulty and dropped it to the ground, beside the open umbrella. The old man then jumped ashore and they carried the basket up the slipway, each holding a handle.

‘Are we going in then?’ asked Estevez, indicating the market, which was now lit up.

Out on the water, the other boat had also switched off its light. Caldas looked at his watch. There were still twenty minutes to go before the start of the auction and he thought he’d rather wait in the car.

The second fisherman’s rowing boat appeared among the other craft soon after. It looked smaller than the old man’s, like a toy.

‘That one’s called Arias,’ said Estevez, and added: ‘He’s taller than me.’

Arias needed no help transferring his catch. Seemingly without effort, he started up the slipway with a basket in each hand.

The policemen watched him cross the road and enter the market, then got out of the car.

The sign above the entrance to the market read in letters set in relief:
MUNICIPAL MARKET
, 1942. Inside, the single-storey stone building consisted of a light and airy hall with a green-painted cement floor. A long metal table ran down the middle of the hall, beneath a notice that cautioned:
No eating, drinking, smoking or spitting
.

Beside the scales, José Arias was kneeling next to one of his baskets. As the policemen approached, they saw that it contained dozens of crabs. The huge fisherman was taking them out, one by one, grasping them firmly by the back legs to avoid being nipped by the claws. He laid them out on various plastic trays according to size and condition – larger ones on one tray, smaller ones on two other trays and the less valuable crabs (skinnier ones or those that had lost a leg) on yet another. He set a few aside in a plastic bag which he knotted and placed on the floor, resting against the wall. Caldas assumed these were the ones he’d be taking home.