He thought for a second.
“Well, I’d either flick the ash into the air or I’d bring an ashtray and have it nearby: beside me or even in my hand.”
“Exactly. And from what the cleaner told me, Glòria Vergès is obsessive about cleaning. She can’t stand smoke, or cigarette butts. I suppose that’s why the boy smoked at the window.” She paused briefly before continuing. “The butt wasn’t on the ground, at least not below the window, when we processed the scene. Yes, he could have thrown it further, but I can’t imagine Marc dirtying the garden anyway. The most logical thing was that he brought the ashtray to the window to save him the bother. But it wasn’t there. It was inside, I remember perfectly, on the shelf beside the window. I think it even appears in some of the photos we took.”
Héctor’s brain was working at full speed, despite the heat.
“It means Marc put out his cigarette and came back in.”
“I thought that. I’ve been mulling it over and it’s nothing definitive. He could easily have smoked, come in and then returned to the window. But according to what we’ve been told, it wasn’t something he usually did. I mean the idea we’ve been sold is that Marc used to sit at the window to smoke. That’s it. Not to think, not to kill time.”
“There’s another possibility,” he rebutted. “Someone might have brought in the ashtray from the window.”
“Yes, I thought of that as well. But the cleaner had to take care of Gina Martí, who had a nervous fit when she woke up; she didn’t go up to the attic before we got there. Señor Castells arrived with his brother, the priest, at the same time as us; his wife and daughter came down afterward; Glòria Vergès didn’t want her daughter to see the body, which is logical, so she stayed in the Collbató chalet until the afternoon.”
“Are you sure Gina didn’t go back into the attic in the morning?”
“According to her statement, she didn’t. The cleaner’s screams woke her and she ran downstairs to the door. Seeing Marc dead brought on a nervous fit and the woman had to make her a herbal tea, which she didn’t drink. Then we arrived. And I can’t see her taking the ashtray from the window and putting it in its place.”
“Let’s see.” Héctor half-closed his eyes. “Let’s imagine the scene: Marc has been hanging out with his friends and the night ends badly. They’ve fought. Badly enough that his t-shirt is bloodstained. Aleix leaves and he sends Gina to bed. It’s almost three a.m. and it’s hot. He changes his dirty t-shirt and before going to bed he does what he always does: smokes a cigarette sitting at the window. We’ll assume that he brought the ashtray-I’m sure he did it out of habit. So he smokes peacefully, stubs out the cigarette, and goes back into the attic: he leaves the ashtray. .”
“See?” insisted Castro. “It doesn’t fit with the idea that he was drunk and fell accidentally. And also, if he was dizzy, he would have noticed and in that case, why go out?”
Héctor thought of the fear he’d read in Joana Vidal’s eyes just a moment before, of Enric Castells’ words, denying with excessive vehemence that his son might have thrown himself into the void voluntarily. Could it have been a suicide? A desperate outburst, because of something that had happened that night perhaps? Or had someone come in, argued with him and ended up pushing him out of the window? It had to be a relatively strong person, which discounted Gina. Aleix? Had they fought, and the broken computer was the result? Leire seemed to follow his reasoning as her eyes were sparkling.
“I did something else,” she said. “This morning I called the Faculty of Computer Science, where Aleix Rovira studies. It wasn’t easy, but in the end they told me: he hasn’t passed a single subject; in fact he’s practically not attended classes since Easter.”
“Wasn’t he some kind of child prodigy?”
“Well, it seems he lost his superpowers when he went to university.”
“Check his calls. I want to know everything about Rovira: who he calls, where he goes, what he usually says, what he does in his spare time, which must be plentiful if he’s not attending class. I get the impression these two brats are playing with us. I’ll call him into the station on Monday so he’ll have to sweat a little. Any problem?”
Leire shook her head, although her expression wasn’t nearly as certain. In fact, that evening she had to collect Tomás from Sants station, and in theory she was off this weekend. She was going to say so out loud when she thought having something to do might not be a bad idea.
“No problem, Inspector.”
“Great. Another thing: Marc wrote to his mother saying he had something he had to sort out here. I don’t think it’s important but-”
“But in this case we’re going along blindly, don’t you think?”
“Completely blind.” He remembered what Savall had said to him and added, unable to avoid a slightly ironic tone, “And don’t forget all this is ‘unofficial.’ I’ll talk to the superintendent. I want to get all possible information on Aleix Rovira together before Monday. Take care of it; I’ll look after interrogating Óscar Vaquero.”
She seemed taken aback.
“The fatty they played the trick on. Yes, I know it was a couple of years ago, but sometimes grudges don’t disappear with time, more like the opposite.” A cynical smile spread over his face. “I assure you.”
17
The air conditioning in that sorry room made an infernal noise. With the curtains-stiff pieces of a moss-green fabric-pulled to block out the blazing sun falling on the city at that hour, the drone of the machine resembled the labored roar of a beast from the underworld. It could have been a roadside motel, one of those establishments that, despite their sordidness, radiate romance or at least sensuality. Rooms that smell of sweaty sheets and intertwined bodies, of furtive but inevitable sex, of desires never fully satiated, of quick showers and cheap cologne. In reality, it wasn’t a motel but a pensión near Plaça Universitat, discreet and even clean if you looked at it with a favorable eye-or, better still, didn’t look at it too much at all-specializing in renting rooms by the hour. Given the proximity to the Gayxample, the gay area par excellence of Barcelona, the majority of the clientele were homosexual, something that in a way was reassuring to Regina. In the seven months of this year so far she’d come more or less regularly to this pensión without ever bumping into anyone she knew. The worst was going in and coming out, but up to now she’d been lucky. Certainly because deep down she couldn’t care less. Not that she and Salvador had an explicitly open relationship, but it had to be more or less obvious to her husband that if he wasn’t making love to her, someone else would have to take his place in bed at least once in a while.
If she was honest with herself, Regina had to admit that when she married Salvador, sixteen years her senior, it wasn’t because the man was an animal in the sexual realm, although in the early years she’d had no cause for complaint in that respect. No, Regina wasn’t an especially passionate woman, but she was proud. She’d been married for twenty-one years and for the first half of that time she had been tremendously happy. Salvador adored her, with a devotion that seemed unswerving, eternal. And she blossomed in his flattery, in those glances that caressed her like a tight mesh enhancing her curves, but not too tight. The only thing she didn’t allow for when she married this gentleman, unconventionally attractive, tall and already gray in the wedding photo, was that this well-known intellectual’s tastes wouldn’t change over time. If at forty-five Salvador noticed twentysomething girls, at sixty-five his interests were still centred on the same young bodies, the same insultingly smooth faces. The kind that need only soap and water to shine. And those young girls, even sillier than Regina had been years ago, found him distinguished, charming, intelligent. Even romantic. They excitedly read his love stories-urban fairytales with titles like The Sweet Taste of First Dates or Overlooking Sadness, which he started to write when his profound books with experimental aspirations bored even the most pretentious critics-and attended his lectures in which words like desire, skin, taste and melancholy were repeated ad nauseam.