He nodded, and inhaled deeply. It was clear that a great many ideas, questions and possibilities were thronging in his mind.
“Don’t be angry,” he finally replied. “But I need time to get used to the idea.”
“You’re not the only one. We have approximately seven months for that.”
He stood up and she knew he was leaving.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
“Of course.” She wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were on the table.
“Hey. .” He came over to her and stroked her cheek. “I’m not running away. I’m just asking for some time out.”
She turned to him, and couldn’t help the irony in her voice.
“Are you out of cigarettes?”
Tomás took a packet out of his shirt pocket.
“No.”
Leire said nothing. She felt the hand move away from her cheek and Tomás taking a step back. She closed her eyes and the next thing she heard was the front door. When she opened them he was gone.
31
Hospital del Mar’s brand-new waiting room was as full as might be expected on a July Saturday, and it took Héctor a moment to locate Sergeant Andreu. In fact, she saw him first and made her way toward him. She put a hand on his shoulder and Héctor turned, startled.
“Martina! What happened?”
“I don’t know. It appears someone broke into her house and attacked her. It’s serious, Héctor. They’ve taken her to the ICU. She hasn’t regained consciousness.”
“Shit.” His expression was so intense the sergeant feared he might lose control. “Héctor, let’s go out for a minute. Right now, we can’t do anything here and. . I have to talk to you.”
She thought he’d refuse, demand to speak to the doctor, but what he did was ask the inevitable question she’d expected.
“How come you found her?”
The sergeant looked at him intently, trying to discern in that altered expression a sign that might let her decide, know. She didn’t find it, so she merely answered in a low voice, “That’s what I want to talk to you about. Let’s go outside.”
The sun was making the mirrors of the cars sparkle. It was half past three in the afternoon and the thermometer was hitting thirty degrees centigrade. Sweaty, Héctor lit a cigarette and smoked hungrily, but he felt sick and the nicotine tasted foul. He threw the remains of the fag on the ground and stubbed it out.
“Calm down a little, Héctor. Please.”
He put his head back and breathed deeply.
“How did you find her?”
“Wait a minute. There’re a couple of things you should know. There’s news in the Omar case.” She was hoping to see some reaction in her colleague’s face, but all she could make out was interest, a desire to know. “Héctor, I asked you this Wednesday when we had lunch, but just so we’re clear. Did you see Omar on Tuesday?”
“Where is this going?”
“Fuck, just answer! Do you think I’d insist if it wasn’t important?”
He looked at her with a mixture of frustration and rage.
“I’ll say this for the last time. I didn’t see Omar on Tuesday. I didn’t see him again after that day. Got that?”
“What did you do on Tuesday evening?”
“Nothing. I went home.”
“You didn’t speak to your ex or your son?”
Héctor looked away.
“What the fuck did you do?”
“I sat down to wait for someone to remember to call me. It was my birthday.”
Martina couldn’t suppress a guffaw.
“Fuck, Héctor! Hard man of the month, going around whacking suspects, and then sitting down at home to cry that nobody remembers him. .”
Despite himself, he smiled.
“Well, getting older makes you sensitive.”
“The worst thing is, I believe you, but a witness saw you outside his house on Tuesday evening, around half past eight.” “What are you saying?” he almost shouted.
“Héctor, I’m just telling you what I’ve found out. I don’t even have to, so do me a favor and don’t raise your voice.” She went on to tell him Rosa’s testimony, not omitting a single detail, as well as the information obtained at midday in the butcher’s. “That’s why I went to your house. The front door was open and I went up. When I passed the first floor I noticed that the door there wasn’t closed either and it seemed strange. I pushed it and. . I found that poor woman unconscious on the floor.” Salgado heard his colleague’s story without interrupting her once. While he was listening to her, his brain tried to fit the other pieces into it: those disturbing recordings of him beating Omar and of Ruth on the beach. He didn’t manage to do it, but he thought Andreu deserved to know. He didn’t want to hide anything else from her, so he told her everything as soon as she’d finished. Then they both stayed quiet, thinking, each absorbed in their own doubts and fears. Héctor reacted first and took out his mobile. Nervously, he looked for his son’s number in his contacts and hit the call button. Luckily, Guillermo answered immediately this time. Salgado spoke to him for a couple of minutes, trying to seem normal. Then, without thinking, he called Ruth. The only reply was a cold voice announcing that the phone was turned off or out of signal. Meanwhile Martina Andreu was watching him attentively. He was aware of it, but told himself she was within her rights. There were reasons for her suspicions, and suddenly he realized-the irony of fate-that he would have to put forward the same argument he’d heard from Savall an hour before. Appeal to her friendship, trust, the years of working together.
“Ruth not answering?” she asked when he put away his mobile.
“No. She’s away. At her parents’ apartment in Sitges. I’ll call her again later. She didn’t find the thing with the DVD very amusing, as you can imagine.” He turned to Sergeant Andreu. “I’m scared, Martina. I feel like my whole world is under threat: me, my house, my family. . And now Carmen. It can’t be a coincidence. Someone is destroying my life.”
“You’re not taking Dr. Omar’s curses seriously, are you?”
He stifled a bitter laugh.
“Right now I could believe anything.” He remembered what the faculty professor had said to him. “But I suppose I must force myself not to fall into that. I’m going to see if there’s any news about Carmen. You needn’t stay.”
She looked at her watch. Ten past four.
“Sure you don’t mind?”
“Of course not. Martina, do you believe me? I know all this seems very strange and all I can ask of you right now is blind trust. But it’s important to me. I didn’t go to see Omar, I didn’t order a pig’s head and I have no clue to his whereabouts. I promise you.”
She took a little while to answer, perhaps more than he hoped and less than she might have needed to give a completely honest answer.
“I believe you. But you’re in a real mess, Salgado. That I will say. And I don’t know if anyone can help you out of it this time.”
“Thanks.” Héctor relaxed his shoulders and looked toward the door of the hospital. “I’m going inside.”
“Keep me posted on any news.”
“Likewise.”
Martina Andreu stayed still a moment, watching Héctor disappear through the entrance to the hospital. Then, slowly, she went to the taxi rank, got into the first cab and gave the driver Salgado’s address.
Sitting on a plastic chair in a corridor near the ICU, Héctor watched the comings and goings of the staff and visitors. At first, he looked at them, but as time passed he half-closed his eyes and focused on their footsteps: fast, slow, firm, anxious. And little by little even that faded from his consciousness, immersed in the memories of what had happened to him over the last five days. The flight, the lost suitcase, the meeting with Savall and the visit to Omar’s clinic were mixed up with the statements of the suspects in the Marc Castells case, the image of Gina bleeding to death in the bath and that macabre vision of the drowned girl in the pool in a film as surreal as it was shocking. He didn’t make the least attempt to put the sequences in order: he let them flow freely in his mind, battle each other to impose themselves on the screen of his memory for a few seconds. Little by little, like the noise surrounding him, these stills began to fade. The chattering calmed, and his brain focused on one particular blurry and poor-quality image, starring him, a violent and brutal Héctor Salgado, beating a defenseless guy with rage. An off-camera voice was added to the image, that of the psychologist, the kid who deep down reminded him of his son. “Think of other moments when you’ve been carried away by rage.” Something he’d refused to do, not just in the past few days but always. But now, waiting for the doctor to give him news of Carmen, that woman who’d treated him almost as a son, he was able to break down the barriers and think of the other moment in his life when rage possessed him: that other day in which everything turned black and all that remained was a bitter taste like bile. His last memory of the first part of his life, the violent end of a phase. Nineteen years putting up with routine beatings at the hands of a “model” father, outwardly a perfect gentleman, every inch an asshole who never hesitated to impose discipline. Why he was normally the target of his rages and not his brother was something the young Héctor had asked himself many times in those nineteen years. That didn’t mean his brother escaped, or anything like it, but as he grew up Héctor noticed a deeper cruelty in the beatings that fell to him. Maybe because his father knew by then that he hated him with all his heart. What he never suspected, not even in the bitterest moments of his childhood, was that there was another victim of these blows, someone who received them behind closed doors, in the intimacy of a bedroom conveniently situated at the other end of a long corridor. How his mother had managed to hide the bruises all those years could be explained only in the context of a home where secrets were the rule and the best thing to do was say little and keep quiet a lot.