‘That’s one way of describing it, I suppose,’ he said.
I noticed that at my mention of the widow his expression darkened, and I wondered what might have happened between them during those unfortunate days.
‘How is she?’ he asked. ‘Señora Marlasca.’
‘I think she misses you.’
Salvador nodded, his fierce manner crumbling.
‘I haven’t been to see her for a long time.’
‘She thinks you blame her for what happened. I think she’d like to see you again, even though so much time has gone by.’
‘Perhaps you’re right. Maybe I should go and pay her a visit…’
‘Can you talk to me about what happened?’
Salvador recovered his severe expression.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Marlasca’s widow told me that you never accepted the official line that her husband took his own life. She said you had suspicions.’
‘More than suspicions. Has anyone told you how Marlasca died?’
‘All I know is that people said it was an accident.’
‘Marlasca died by drowning. At least, that’s what the police report said.’
‘How did he drown?’
‘There’s only one way of drowning, but I’ll come back to that later. The curious thing is where he drowned.’
‘In the sea?’
Salvador smiled. It was a dark, bitter smile, like the coffee that was brewing.
‘Are you sure you want to hear this?’
‘I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.’
He handed me a cup and looked me up and down, assessing me.
‘I assume you’ve visited that son-of-a-bitch Valera.’
‘If you mean Marlasca’s partner, he’s dead. The one I spoke to was his son.’
‘Another son-of-a-bitch, except he has fewer guts. I don’t know what he told you, but I’m sure he didn’t say that between them they managed to get me thrown out of the police force and turned me into a pariah who couldn’t even beg for money in the streets.’
‘I’m afraid he forgot to include that in his version of events,’ I conceded.
‘It doesn’t surprise me.’
‘You were going to tell me how Marlasca drowned.’
‘That’s where it gets interesting,’ said Salvador. ‘Did you know that Señor Marlasca, apart from being a lawyer, a scholar and a writer, had, as a young man, won the annual Christmas swim across the port organised by the Barcelona Swimming Club?’
‘How can a champion swimmer drown?’ I asked.
‘The question is where did he drown. Señor Marlasca’s body was found in the pond on the roof of the Water Reservoir building in Ciudadela Park. Do you know the place?’
I swallowed and nodded. It was there that I’d first encountered Corelli.
‘If you know it, you’ll know that, when it’s full, it’s barely a metre deep. It’s essentially a basin. The day the lawyer was found dead, the reservoir was half-empty and the water level was no more than sixty centimetres.’
‘A champion swimmer doesn’t drown in sixty centimetres of water, just like that,’ I observed.
‘That’s what I said to myself.’
‘Were there other points of view?’
Salvador smiled bitterly.
‘For a start, it’s doubtful whether he drowned at all. The pathologist who carried out the autopsy found water in the lungs, but his report said that death had occurred as a result of heart failure.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘When Marlasca fell into the pond, or when he was pushed, he was on fire. His body had third-degree burns on the torso, arms and face. According to the pathologist, the body could have been alight for almost a minute before it came into contact with the water. The remains of the lawyer’s clothes showed the presence of some type of solvent on the fabrics. Marlasca was burned alive.’
It took me a few minutes to digest all this.
‘Why would anyone want to do something like that?’
‘A settling of scores? Pure cruelty? You choose. My opinion is that somebody wanted to delay the identification of Marlasca’s body in order to gain time and confuse the police.’
‘Who?’
‘Jaco Corbera.’
‘Irene Sabino’s agent.’
‘Who disappeared the same day Marlasca died, together with the balance from a personal account in the Banco Hispano Colonial which his wife didn’t know about.’
‘A hundred thousand French francs,’ I said.
Salvador looked at me, intrigued.
‘How did you know?’
‘It’s not important. What was Marlasca doing on the roof of the reservoir anyway? It’s not exactly on the way to anywhere.’
‘That’s another confusing point. We found a diary in Marlasca’s study in which he had written down an appointment there at five in the afternoon. Or that’s what it looked like. In the diary he’d only specified a time, a place and an initial. C. Probably for Corbera.’
‘Then what do you think happened?’ I asked.
‘What I think, and what the evidence suggests, is that Jaco fooled Irene into manipulating Marlasca. As you probably know, the lawyer was obsessed with all that mumbo-jumbo about seances, especially since the death of his son. Jaco had a partner, Damián Roures, who was mixed up in that world. A real fraudster. Between the two of them, and with the help of Irene Sabino, they conned Marlasca, promising that they could help him make contact with the boy in the spirit world. Marlasca was a desperate man, ready to believe anything. That trio of vermin had organised the perfect sting but then Jaco became too greedy for his own good. Some think that Sabino didn’t act in bad faith, that she genuinely was in love with Marlasca and believed in all that supernatural nonsense, just as he did. It is a possibility but I don’t buy it, and seeing how things turned out, it’s irrelevant. Jaco knew that Marlasca had those funds in the bank and decided to get him out of the way and disappear with the money, leaving a trail of chaos behind him. The appointment in the diary may well have been a red herring left by Sabino or Jaco. There was no way at all of knowing whether Marlasca himself had noted it down.’
‘And where did the hundred thousand francs Marlasca had in the Hispano Colonial come from?’
‘Marlasca had paid that money into the account himself, in cash, the year before. I haven’t the faintest idea where he could have laid hands on a sum of that size. What I do know is that the remainder was withdrawn, in cash, on the morning of the day Marlasca died. Later, the lawyers said that the money had been transferred to some sort of discretionary fund and had not disappeared; they said Marlasca had simply decided to reorganise his finances. But I find it hard to believe that a man should reorganise his finances, moving almost one hundred thousand francs in the morning, and be discovered, burned alive, in the afternoon, without there being some connection. I don’t believe this money ended up in some mysterious fund. To this day, there has been nothing to convince me that the money didn’t end up in the hands of Jaco Corbera and Irene Sabino. At least at first, because I doubt that she saw any of it after Jaco disappeared.’
‘What happened to Irene?’
‘That’s another aspect that makes me think Jaco tricked both of his accomplices. Shortly after Marlasca’s death, Roures left the afterlife industry and opened a shop selling magic tricks on Calle Princesa. As far as I know, he’s still there. Irene Sabino worked for a couple more years in increasingly tawdry clubs and cabarets. The last thing I heard, she was prostituting herself in El Raval and living in poverty. She obviously didn’t get a single franc. Nor did Roures.’
‘And Jaco?’
‘He probably left the country under a false name and is living comfortably somewhere off the proceeds.’
The whole story, far from clarifying things in my mind, only raised more questions. Salvador must have noticed my unease and gave me a commiserating smile.
‘Valera and his friends in the town hall managed to persuade the press to publish the story about an accident. He resolved the matter with a grand funeraclass="underline" he didn’t want to muddy the reputation of the law firm, whose client list included many members of the town hall and the city council. Nor did he wish to draw attention to Marlasca’s strange behaviour during the last twelve months of his life, from the moment he abandoned his family and associates and decided to buy a ruin in a part of town he had never set his well-shod foot in so that he could devote himself to writing, or at least that’s what his partner said.’