“Martina!”
“Héctor, it’s finished. It’s finished! All over. Fuck, Inspector, you owe me one. This time you really owe me one.”
36
As soon as Héctor had left, Sergeant Andreu had gone back into the flat where Omar’s mistreated corpse lay. She was by then mentally prepared for what she was going to find, so this time she observed the scene with the detachment required. If in life that man had caused pain, it was clear that he’d paid for it with a slow death, she said to herself as she knelt by the body. Abandoned like a dog. She wasn’t an expert in forensic science, but she knew enough to see that the old doctor had died between twenty-four and forty-eight hours earlier. The large contusion visible on the nape of his neck, however, was older than that. Yes, the doctor had been given an almost fatal blow days before, the day of his disappearance, and they’d left him there, tied up, gagged, dying. In a show of sadism, she thought, remembering the disk in the DVD player, his killer had recorded the exact moment of his death for posterity.
She stood up slowly. However much she wanted to avoid it, all the evidence pointed to Héctor. A witness had seen him with the victim the evening he disappeared; a man with an Argentine accent had ordered then paid for the pig’s head over the phone. The call could have been made from anywhere. She hadn’t received a very trustworthy description from the boy at the butcher’s. Apart from the accent, the information contributed by the boy had been rather vague. Vague, yes, but not contrary to Salgado’s physical appearance at all. And then there was the corpse, just below Héctor’s flat. And the discs in his house. Martina closed her eyes and could visualize part of the sequence of events, though not all. Of course it was hard for her to imagine Héctor recording anyone’s death, in an act of perverse voyeurism, and much less attacking that poor neighbor of his. But what if Carmen’s assault was a mere coincidence? Something that had happened that day and had nothing to do with the Omar case?
Enough, she admonished herself. There was nothing more to see. She left the room as she’d found it, and then did the same with Carmen’s keys. A strange uneasiness came over her when she’d done so, the indefinable feeling that she was overlooking something. Or perhaps it was the fear that someone might find out what she’d taken upon herself: those hours of a head start she’d given to a possible murderer. . She was playing for him, she thought, without the slightest guarantee she could win the game.
She dismissed the idea of going back to Omar’s flat and decided to go to the station, shut herself in her office with all the material and find a crack, a thread to pull. She looked at her watch. A long and possibly pointless night lay ahead of her, but she wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. Not yet.
Two hours later, however, with a crick in her neck and red eyes, the feeling of being beaten was overwhelming her. She’d re-read all the files, the ones from before the doctor’s disappearance when he was under investigation for his connection with the network of pimps, as well as the most recent. She had produced a detailed outline using the witness statements: the lawyer who said he’d seen him on Monday night; the butcher; and above all that of Rosa, which placed the doctor in his office on Tuesday evening. She’d posed all the questions, and although she hadn’t managed to answer them all completely, they all directed her thoughts to one name: Héctor Salgado.
For the last time, she went over the questions still unanswered. Some were circumstantial, along the lines of: how had Héctor moved Omar’s body to the empty flat in Poblenou? He could have borrowed a friend’s car, she told herself. Or his exwife’s. What’s more, she thought, he could even have taken one of the police vehicles. Not easy, but he could have done it. Question dismissed. Another point against the inspector.
She was exhausted. Her back, head, stomach all hurt. Hurt her to the point of irritability. But this same extreme fatigue forced her to keep going in an almost masochistic effort. She closed her eyes for a moment, breathed deeply and returned to the task, from the beginning. Another question dangled around the search of the house and the doctor’s accounts. If she assumed, and she had no reason to doubt it, that this quack had collaborated with the women-trafficking ring, where was the money he got from it? Not in the bank, logically, but not in his house either. The question remained unanswered, but in no way did it exonerate Héctor. His motive, were he guilty, had never been robbery, but revenge. A distorted sense of justice. The same thing that had driven him to beat Omar.
“It’s over,” she said out loud. She couldn’t take it any more. She wasn’t giving any more of herself. Maybe the best thing was to report the finding of the body with all the consequences and for Héctor to submit to the appropriate investigation. She’d done all she could. . She took a few minutes before making the call that would set the whole process in motion, while she considered how to cover up her act, unprofessional from any perspective. She set the Omar papers aside and while she meditated on her own situation, she opened the file of battered women who had registered for the self-defense course she would be teaching in the autumn. If she wasn’t put on checkpoints when all this came out, she thought. She went on leafing through pages, looking at photos. Unfortunately they couldn’t accept them all, although she made an effort to take the maximum number of pre-registered women. Then some always dropped out, whether because they didn’t feel able or they’d resigned themselves to putting up with these bastards. Poor women, she thought once again. Those who didn’t deal with them didn’t have a clue of the terror they were subjected to. They were all ages, from a variety of backgrounds, different nationalities, but they all had fear, shame, distrust written on their faces.
She stopped at the photo of a woman she instantly recognized. It was Rosa, no doubt about it. María del Rosario Álvarez, according to the form. Finding her there didn’t surprise Marina all that much: Rosa had spoken of a husband she feared. She remembered her words in the park, her desperate plea to remain anonymous. Rosa must have forgiven her husband, since the report of assault was from February. But then another name caught the sergeant’s eye. A name that chilled and unnerved her at once. The lawyer who’d represented Rosa was Damián Fernández, the same person who defended Omar’s interests.
She had to force herself to stay calm, to think about this unexpected connection with a tranquillity which had abandoned her hours earlier. She went back to Omar’s file, but this time she studied it from a radically different perspective. Who had seen Omar on Tuesday? Rosa. Who had positively identified Héctor? Rosa. Only her, because an Argentine accent, the butcher’s contribution, was easily imitated. Other than this woman’s word, there was no proof that Omar was safe and sound on Tuesday evening. If this testimony was discounted, what was left? Damián Fernández’s statement, which said he’d met Omar on Monday. And that was probably true. That Monday, the lawyer had gone to see his client, not to present the deal offered by Savall but to beat him. Yes, to beat him and steal the money he definitely had hidden in some corner of that fucking house! And then. . then he’d calmly brought the badly injured body, in the middle of the night, to the empty flat, taking advantage of the fact that Héctor wasn’t returning until the following day. The strange feeling she had had leaving the keys in Carmen’s house, that game with all the keys of the building that the woman barely used, came back to her forcefully. She didn’t know how Damián Fernández managed to get them, but she was sure he had. Keys he’d copied and used as he pleased, entering Héctor’s house when he wasn’t there, and the empty flat to imprison Omar’s body and record his death. Even Carmen’s assault fitted now. She must have surprised him at some point, probably while he was leaving the latest bits of evidence in Salgado’s home, and he’d had no choice but to split her head and bring her down to the first floor. And, amidst all this, his accomplice Rosa had called her and played her part to perfection, putting Héctor at the scene.