Water-Blue Eyes (16 page)

The superintendent remained silent before Caldas’s line of reasoning. The inspector stood up.

‘Now you know what Zuriaga’s doing here, sir.’

It rained on 20 May. It felt like winter.

At one thirty in the afternoon, Leo Caldas leaned on the bar and asked for some wine as an aperitif while he waited for the
luras
Carlos had found that morning in the market. Carlos had called him and other regulars to tell them of his extraordinary discovery, and to announce he would stew them for lunch in the traditional way, in a light wine sauce with onions, laurel and potatoes. Attracted by the promise of the small cephalopods, Leo had arrived early at the tavern. The dons were also in front of their wine mugs at that
unusual
hour. All four of them, like Caldas, normally came to the Eligio in the evening, but they had been bewitched by the idea of the sea delicacy and had fitted it into their schedules.

As on every day in the last week, the front page of the local paper gave plenty of space to the ‘Zuriaga affair’. The case had become a sort of popular lynching of the notable arts patron. Although the trial had yet to start, the press had already sentenced him. They accused him of being a brutal serial killer and a homosexual with depraved tastes.

The doctor still claimed he was innocent, in spite of the mounting evidence against him. His team of lawyers hung firmly to the fact that the fingerprint found on the glass in Reigosa’s flat did not match the doctor’s, which meant there was no proof Zuriaga had been at the flat on Toralla Island at the moment of the crime.

However, there wasn’t much they could do about the results of the analysis of the latex glove. These confirmed both that the powder on the outside had come from a
firearm
such as had been used to kill Orestes, and that there were traces of Zuriaga’s DNA on the inside.

The lead picture in the paper showed an exhausted Zuriaga, flanked by one of his lawyers and his niece Diana. The doctor, visibly disheartened, seemed about to concede defeat at any moment. But, in spite of all the difficulties, his niece fought without rest to establish his innocence. As the present spokesperson of his uncle, Diana Alonso Zuriaga took every opportunity the press gave her to publicly call attention to the doctor’s outstanding altruistic career, and to strongly condemn the injustice to which, in her view, he was being subjected.

The doctor’s wife had not shown her face in public. The papers reported she had stayed at the family home ever since her husband had been arrested and was sunk in a severe depression.

‘These people are in big trouble,’ said Carlos, pointing at the paper as he filled Caldas’s mug with wine.

‘They are.’

From a nearby table, a don who was flicking through the paper asked Caldas if he’d been involved in the Zuriaga case.

‘I had something to do with it,’ he replied tersely.

‘They should write a novel about your adventures, Leo,’ said another of the professors.

‘Of course,’ agreed the inspector with a wink.

‘I mean it,’ insisted the don, ‘crime novels do very well.’

‘Well, go ahead,’ said Caldas, taking a sip from his mug.

Caldas mulled over the professors words as he savoured the pleasantly sour aftertaste of the wine.

Suddenly, like a bursting bubble, that nagging feeling he’d had for so many days stopped. And as it did, it brought back a vivid memory, allowing him to identify that which had attracted his attention on his first inspection of Reigosa’s flat but had failed to stay in his mind.

He remembered the dead man’s bookshelves with great clarity, and they had been full of crime novels. He
remembered too that one of the books on the night table belonged to that genre. However, the other one, which had a bookmark in it, was something completely different, a nearly eight-hundred-page volume by Hegel.

Although it wasn’t relevant at all for the case, he was relieved.

‘Do you think it’s normal for a man who usually reads crime novels to read Hegel’s
Lessons
in
the
Philosophy
of
History
before going to sleep?’ he asked in the direction of the professors.

A bit surprised, all eyes turned to the oldest of the four.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said, as if the others’ gazes forced him to speak. ‘I’d say that, in spite of the metaphors he uses to clarify his theories, Hegel is too rich a meal to digest at bedtime.’

His three learned dining companions agreed.

‘Wasn’t it Hegel who wrote one of the most notorious defences of the Inquisition?’ put in Carlos from behind the bar, showing his background as an experienced manager of the illustrated tavern.

‘You could see it that way, Carlos, though only up to a point. Hegel tends to justify anything that brings mankind closer to salvation – the salvation of the soul, that is. And in that sense you could say he might justify any Torquemada,’ explained the old professor, ‘for Hegel welcomes pain if it’s a cause for repentance.’

Caldas found those words familiar. He remembered a
caller
had said something of the like on his radio show, and it seemed a strange coincidence. He picked up his mobile phone, dialled the radio’s number, and asked to be put through to production.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you, Rebeca.’

‘Leo, what a surprise! Is anything wrong?’

‘No, I only wanted to ask you whether it would be possible to trace a call we received on the programme. Just out of curiosity.’

‘If it’s recent, there’s no problem. Programmes are recorded and kept on file for a while. What date are you after?’

‘It was last week, but I can’t remember the exact day,’ said Caldas hesitantly. ‘I’m sure you remember it better than me. I’m trying to trace that caller who didn’t let Losada utter a word. A guy who said just one sentence, a bit of an
apocalyptic
phrase, and then hung up.’

‘I know who you mean. The boss went into a bit of a tizzy after that call,’ replied Rebeca. ‘I’m sure I have it to hand. We keep a record of abusive callers, pranksters and crazy guys like this one. That way, if they call again, we don’t put them through. It’s not a very reliable filter, but it’s better than nothing,’ she explained. ‘Now let’s see … Yes, here it is. He was called Angel, although I doubt that was his real name. The phrase he said was “Let us welcome pain if it is cause for repentance”. He said it twice, quite slowly, and I managed to write it down. Hopefully we’ll recognise him if he ever calls again.’

‘Thanks, Rebeca, you’re a marvel,’ he said, pleased at how quickly the producer had found the sentence. It seemed a bit odd that the caller should have quoted from the very same book that was on Reigosa’s night table.

‘Do you want to write down the number, Leo?’

That was more than he’d expected.

‘Go on,’ he said, borrowing a ballpoint pen sticking out of the pocket of Carlos’s shirt.

‘Anything else?’ she kindly asked after dictating it.

‘Actually, yes. Is it possible to find out what day the call was made?’

‘Of course, Leo. It was 12 May.’

Caldas double-checked the date of Luis Reigosa’s murder. There it was: he’d been killed on the night of 11 May.

After he rang off he experienced that strange feeling that coincidences give rise to. He was about to ring the number that Rebeca had just given him when he thought better of it,
and instead decided to ring up the police station and obtain an address.

‘This is Caldas, I need an address for this number, please.’

As he waited, he listened to the professors. Mugs in hand, they were still considering various approximations to Hegel. They had reached the democratic, if simplistic, conclusion, that the German philosopher’s had been an insufferable bore above all.

‘Inspector?’ the voice on the other end of the line said. ‘That’s not a private number. It’s a public phone in a hospital.’

‘Which one?’ asked Caldas with the sense of unease of someone who thinks he already knows the answer.

‘The Zuriaga Foundation, inspector,’ said the officer, thus confirming Caldas’s hunch.

‘Many thanks,’ muttered Caldas and rang off.

He slumped on to a bench by one of the windows in the tavern, and stared fixedly at the raindrops splattering against the glass framed in green wood. He didn’t even move when he smelled the steaming stew that Carlos was bringing to the table.

‘God save the
luras
!’

The inspector went out into the street.

No one paid attention to him.

Inspector Caldas walked down between the rows of desks at the police station. As he went past Estévez, he motioned him to follow. He went through the glass door of his office, hung his jacket on the coat rack, slumped into his black leather chair and picked up the phone.

‘What’s the matter, chief?’ asked Estévez.

‘I’d like you to do me a favour,’ replied the inspector cupping the receiver. ‘Call Riofarma, speak to Ramón Ríos, and find out if there’s any news on Isidro Freire.’

Estévez left the office and disappeared among the desks.

‘Forensics? Inspector Caldas here. May I speak to Clara Barcia?’

Since he’d left Eligio’s, the inspector wanted a word with the officer who had led the inspection of Reigosa’s flat. He knew how meticulous Clara’s work was and trusted she would be of help.

‘Clara, it’s Caldas,’ he said when she came on. ‘I’d like to ask you a question about the Reigosa case, at the Toralla tower. Do you remember the book on the night table?’

‘Hegel’s or the other one?’ asked the officer.

‘Hegel’s. Did you notice anything odd about it? A mark of some kind, a note, a dedication, a label, anything?’

‘Except for an underlined sentence I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, inspector.’

‘What underlined sentence?’

‘There was a sentence underlined in pencil, inspector. It was on the same page as the bookmark.’

‘Do you remember what it said?’ asked Caldas.

‘The sentence? I can’t remember verbatim, but it was a bit
morbid, something about accepting pain and repenting,’ replied Clara.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Caldas tensely.

‘More or less, yes,’ she said hesitantly.

‘Why haven’t I been informed of this?’

‘It’s all in the report, inspector,’ answered Clara in a reedy voice.

‘In the report?’

Caldas had not read Clara Barcia’s final report. After Dimas Zuriaga’s arrest, he had considered the case closed and had not looked back. His job was finished once a suspect had been captured and the evidence had been put forward; then the court of first instance took over.

‘I added a handwritten note to the effect that the sentence seemed to confirm your theory of a crime of passion,’ said Clara. Her voice betrayed a measure of surprise at the tone Caldas was employing with her. ‘Did you not read it?’

Caldas didn’t answer. He limited himself to shifting a pile of papers lying on his desk.

‘As the doctor had already been arrested,’ the officer went on, ‘I didn’t think it was necessary to bring your attention to it.’

The inspector turned over a stapled dossier which was
hidden
under a stack of other documents. It was Clara Barcia’s report, with all her conclusions concerning the murder.

‘Shit,’ muttered Caldas. ‘I’m sorry, Clara, I’ll talk to you later.’

He hung up and quickly flicked through the pages,
searching
for the transcription of the sentence. He was pretty sure it hadn’t been underlined just by chance. And he confirmed it when he read it: ‘Let us welcome pain if it is cause for repentance’.

‘Shit, shit,’ he repeated as he read it over and over.

‘May I come in, chief?’ interrupted Rafael Estévez.

‘Any news on Freire?’ asked Caldas without lifting his eyes from the dossier.

Estévez shook his head.

‘He hasn’t turned up at the office since the day of our visit.’

The inspector put down the report, steepled his hands and rested his mouth on them.

‘Of course he hasn’t,’ he mumbled. ‘What an idiot I’ve been.’

Caldas stood up, got his jacket and quickly walked out of his office, with his assistant trying hard to keep up.

The two policemen were driving along the waterfront. It was raining hard, and they couldn’t see the road clearly. Although it was only mid-afternoon, the sky was as dark as the sea.

‘What do you mean it wasn’t him?’ asked a disorientated Estévez. ‘But it was you who put all the evidence together to arrest him.’

‘All I’m saying for now is that it might not have been him. There’s that possibility,’ replied Caldas from the passenger seat.

Estévez didn’t understand his sudden change of mind.

‘Would you mind telling me what’s happened to make you think he might be innocent?’

‘You can have smoke without a fire,’ replied Caldas cryptically.

‘I’m sorry, inspector, but I haven’t got my Rosetta Stone with me. Are you going to tell me or are we playing charades again?’

Caldas didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. He’d been wrong once before and didn’t intend to be wrong once again. In addition, he knew that thoughts, like wine, needed time to settle. Yet he decided to tell Estévez what was going through his mind.

‘The day Reigosa turned up dead I got a call at the radio. A man said the phrase: “Let us welcome pain if it is cause for repentance”. It’s a quote from Hegel, which the caller repeated twice, for us to hear it clearly. Every week we get weird calls,’ explained the inspector, ‘so that call wouldn’t
have been important at all if there had not been, on Reigosa’s night table, a book by that very same German thinker, Hegel. That book didn’t fit in with the other books Reigosa had at home, which were a lot lighter. And somehow I can’t imagine Reigosa curling up with a volume of
nineteenth-
century philosophy after a concert.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ replied Estévez. ‘If he didn’t mind sleeping with men, I don’t see what’s wrong with Hegel, to be honest.’

Caldas was too worried to laugh at the joke, and went on expounding his later discoveries, even though he hadn’t intended to open his mouth for the rest of the journey. He realised that thinking out loud helped him select those facts that were really relevant.

‘The volume had a bookmark in it, and on that page someone had underlined a phrase in pencil. I’ve just found out that it was the same phrase that the caller had uttered on air during my show.’ Caldas interrupted the explanation for a moment to get a cigarette. ‘All incoming calls at the radio station are recorded for a while,’ he went on after he lit up. ‘And that particular one had been made from a phone booth in the hall of the Zuriaga Foundation.’

‘And what’s so weird about that?’ interrupted Estévez. ‘I think it explains the case even better. Hegel’s phrase confirms what we knew already – that the doctor wanted to inflict a gruesome punishment on the saxophonist as an act of revenge for his betrayal.’

‘There I don’t agree, Rafa. No one who’s planning to
murder
someone sows clues all over the place in such a childish way. It all seems too neat, too deliberate,’ said the inspector, winding down the window just a crack to let the smoke out. ‘It can’t be that easy.’

‘Your intuition again, chief. Where I’m from we say that if it looks like a duck, it walks like a duck and it goes “quack”, then it is a duck.’

‘It’s not my intuition, can’t you see?’

For a few seconds, the only sound was the patter of the rain on the roof of the car and the screeching swing of the windscreen wipers.

‘What is it I’ve got to see?’ asked Estévez, who was unable to put his finger on what Caldas found so obvious.

‘We followed the lead of the formaldehyde and we came to Dimas Zuriaga in two days‚’ explained the inspector. ‘Everything happened too quickly – there wasn’t enough time for the evidence to mature.’

‘Is that wrong, chief? You should be proud at how quickly we found the murderer. Remember there were two victims. Three, if Freire turns up.’

‘But it would have been more normal for us to get
sidetracked
until Clara found the phrase in the book.’ This hypothesis was taking shape in the inspector’s mind. ‘And then I would have remembered that those were the same words someone had uttered on the radio show. Do you
realise
now?’ he asked, looking fixedly at Estévez. Estévez nodded slightly, almost out of duty, and Caldas resumed his speculations.

‘The call had been made from the Zuriaga Foundation, and so we would’ve concentrated our investigation there. With a little time and effort we would’ve found out about Zuriaga and Reigosa’s relationship, because we know from experience that facts cannot remain hidden forever. Sooner or later we would have come to the doctor.’

‘But that line of reasoning, far from exculpating Zuriaga, would incriminate him even more,’ replied Estévez.

‘You don’t get it, Rafa. If the doctor is the murderer as you say, how do you explain that call to the radio station? And how would you account for his leaving the book with that same underlined phrase at Reigosa’s? He might as well have left us a calling card.’

By now Caldas was sure that Hegel’s book did not belong to Reigosa, but had been planted in the bedroom by the murderer, in order to incriminate someone else.

‘There is a possibility, though, that the doctor may have wanted to play cat and mouse with you, inspector. Even if you don’t admit it, you’re someone in this city, same as he is. He may have left clues to test you. He wouldn’t be the first one to do such a thing.’

‘Have you seen Zuriaga’s latest pictures in the papers?’ asked Caldas. ‘He looks completely washed out. Do you think a criminal who likes arm-wrestling with justice looks like that?’

Estévez didn’t reply; he was aware of Zuriaga’s deterioration.

‘He’s resigned to his fate, he’s lowered his arms,’ added Caldas. ‘Hardly the attitude of someone fighting an
intellectual
battle.’

‘There you’re right,’ conceded Estévez.

‘Now, to return to the book and the call – killers take care to cover up their traces, not to leave any evidence lying around. Whoever planned this mess wanted all clues to point in one direction only, in the direction of Dimas Zuriaga,’ concluded Caldas. ‘I’ve got a feeling it’s all a set-up. By chance I didn’t fall for it, but, for unknown reasons, I’ve ended up exactly where the murderer wanted me to go in the first place – arresting the doctor and accusing him of murder.’

Estévez was not entirely convinced.

‘Are you sure that we’re on the right track now, chief?’

This far in the game, Caldas was no longer concerned about tracks; he simply wanted to arrive at the truth. Only a few hours before, he had no doubts that Zuriaga was guilty; now he was considering the possibility that he might be
completely
innocent. He had taken the wrong turn at some point during the investigation, but he was prepared to go back to square one and proceed in a different direction.

‘I don’t know if we are,’ replied the inspector. ‘I’m hoping to find Freire, and for him to clarify a couple of things.’

Estévez turned towards his superior.

‘Do you think Freire is alive?’ he asked, as he remembered that a short time ago his boss had assumed that the owner of the little black dog that had bitten his shoes at Riofarma was dead.

‘Orestes was killed in a hurry. They didn’t have time to prepare the crime. It’s been eight days since Freire’s
disappearance
, too many for a murdered corpse to remain hidden. I’m inclined to think that it’s Freire himself who has no intention of coming out into the open,’ said the inspector, his eyes fixed on the road, which was barely visible behind the curtain of rain. ‘Besides, we’ve got all those calls to Zuriaga’s house the days before the murder of Reigosa. Why would Freire need to speak to the doctor so often? Zuriaga had access to formaldehyde without the need to contact the
distributor
– he just needed to get it from his hospital. I don’t know what he was after, but Freire was not trying to sell a few litres of formaldehyde to the doctor. It was something else.’

‘Have they asked Zuriaga about Freire again?’

‘Zuriaga keeps repeating the same – he doesn’t know a thing about the crimes, doesn’t know Freire, didn’t know who Orestes was, and loved Reigosa deeply,’ enumerated Caldas. ‘He has not altered his declaration one iota in all these days.’

‘And what do you have to say about the latex glove?’ asked Estévez, who, although he had admired his boss’s
reasoning
, still harboured doubts. ‘Do you think Zuriaga didn’t kill the DJ either?’

Caldas, who had no answer for that, limited himself to a shrug. He knew that the DNA was incontrovertible proof of Orestes Grial’s murder: no judge would absolve Zuriaga of that. However, he still thought the glove didn’t solve the puzzle of Reigosa’s death and Freire’s disappearance. The doctor’s only hope might be hidden in some tiny detail that he, Caldas, had overlooked. The most difficult cases were often solved after a seemingly insignificant point was brought to attention.

Dimas Zuriaga was too shocked to remember, but Caldas trusted that someone near him might have noticed
something
, however small, that might help to establish his innocence.

Estévez stopped the car before the enormous wooden gate. Caldas raised his collar, got out of the car and, dodging puddles, walked over to the wall and rang the bell.

Under the heavy rain, the inspector waited for an answer.