“I want to be informed about everything. What you’re up to. Who you’re visiting. Who you’re talking to. I want to know your movements on the island. Anything I can help you with, just call, but remember this is Gothard, things work differently here, still do. Gothard has its own laws,” the chancellor spat at me.
At that precise moment, I was reminded of one of those westerns in which the sheriff shouts that bit about “I am the law!” I was about to shout it myself. I was about to affix those words to Aidan Faol’s forehead. I held back. After all, as far as I was concerned, all of that, the whole island, was enemy territory. I didn’t like Gothard. I don’t like Gothard. I suppose they don’t like me, or us, much either.
Lúa was inside the room. We exchanged glances. I could see it all reflected in her eyes, as if they were a mirror. Who could commit such a barbarous act? Anybody can. On the outskirts of Beth, where the poorest districts are, people will stab you in return for a crust of bread. Meanwhile, in the centre, the apartments have hundreds of square metres, and all the owners have their own servants. That’s the reality of the city. For the rich to have money and possessions, there must be those who don’t. Who get by on a pittance. Pillaging within a single society. The new, legal form of slavery. Even though this has always gone on. We are the slaves of those who have more than us, and the things they have, they get as a result of our work. We don’t just work for ourselves. To pay the mortgage, the water, gas, to buy bread… We also work to make them rich.
The four bodies were lying on the floor of the sitting room. There was a lot of blood. I could barely bring myself to look at the two children. They were lying face downwards. The girl still had a pencil in her hand, and there was a colouring book next to her. The father was lying face upwards, his eyes open behind the glasses. It looked as if he were eyeing up some damp stain on the ceiling or wondering what colour to paint it next summer. On the table, an open book, Moon Palace. “Paul Auster,” I thought. He was at the point where it talks about Tesla and his wild hallucinations as an old man on the streets of New York (he hadn’t even got halfway). The teacher’s wife was beautiful. Even dead, she hadn’t lost her charm. Blonde and white. I wondered whether they might have sexually abused her before killing her. They tend to do that sort of thing in Beth.
I wanted to get the hell out of there. The stench in that room turned my stomach. They turned my stomach. The four dead bodies and all those images floating in my mind, imagining how it might have happened. The crime. I had to sit down for a while. What with all the flashes, the little signs with numbers, the tapes and all the paraphernalia of forensics, I felt obliged to take some time out. I was tired.
“Are you OK, inspector?”
“Yes, yes. It’s just I’m a little worn out. You know, not sleeping, stuff like that… What do we have here, Lúa?”
“Well. The man is Niall Haggerty, Gothard’s schoolteacher, a native of the island. The blonde woman is his wife, Laia Haggerty, born in Beth. As far as we know, they met up in London, where they were both studying. The boy, Ciarán Haggerty, is the couple’s young son, he’s five years old, and the girl is Lía Haggerty, she’s twelve and it seems she’s not his biological daughter. Laia got pregnant by another man when she was very young. When she met Niall, he adopted the girl as his daughter. We’re trying to find out who the biological father was…”
“Lúa, tell me something I don’t know.”
Lúa stared at the notebook she always held in her hand. She has it all written down there. She lifted her head and breathed in. Looked at me. “I was just getting there.” She didn’t say this, but she thought it. Lúa is a swan hiding behind an ugly duckling’s plumage. I’m quite sure with a short dress and a couple of lines of make-up she would make more than a man or two sit up and take notice. She’s beautiful. There’s no doubt about that. All the same, she doesn’t like to advertise the fact. Hers is an untidy kind of aesthetics. Grab the first four items of clothing in the wardrobe, as if getting dressed with your eyes closed. Levis, shirt, sports shoes… She didn’t seem to care all that much. She didn’t think about men or having children or going out partying. Then there was the question of her father. She lived with him, and the old guy had Alzheimer’s. He would disappear in the middle of the night and later be found, almost naked, a couple of miles from the house. At other times, the old guy thought he was someone else. A medieval knight, a superhero, a celebrity chef… Or else he might recall situations from the past he kept in a little box inside his polished mind. It should be said this attitude had started much earlier. At the time of the tragic accident. The Alzheimer’s had made it worse, and now Lúa’s father is on a one-way ticket to death. He’s heading straight for the precipice, and there’s no stopping him.
Lúa was a good officer – not like Pietre, but more disciplined. She always did what she was told. She always followed the rulebook. Never cut corners. She was a flesh-and-blood robot. She had a rosy future in the Beth police force.
“Yes, inspector. From what we can tell, they were murdered with a bladed weapon, a knife perhaps. The strange thing is there are lots of stab wounds. The pathologist will tell us once he’s done the autopsy, but we think there may be five on each body.” The pathologist’s report would later confirm that there were seven stab wounds on each body, which sounded like far too much of a coincidence.
I felt like throwing up. I almost vomited the coffee I had drunk. I couldn’t get the Haggerty children out of my mind. Two children, like two discarded objects.
“Are you all right?” asked Lúa again, with a look of concern.
I got up. I wanted to view the scene. Move around the room without moving. Observe every detail, as if I were a spirit and could see from every angle. That was my virtue. I walked without walking. I lifted the bodies without lifting. I touched everything without touching.
“Lúa.”
“Yes?”
“I want you to question all the inhabitants of Gothard. I want to know where they were yesterday. In particular, those who live near the lighthouse. Take statements from everybody. Search the house from top to bottom. Oh, and then inform the chancellor. Inform him after you’ve done what I told you.”
“But, sir, we have to inform him beforehand, the law of Goth…”
“I am the law!” I felt like saying. “Call him afterwards. We have to be a step in front. It must have been an acquaintance, Lúa. Possibly more than one. I’m sure of that. Imagine we’re talking about our things and stuff like that. Suddenly, I stab you with a knife. Bam! You would fall down wounded on the floor. Just like the Haggertys. You wouldn’t have been expecting that. You know me, you trust me. The girl has a pencil in her hand, she wasn’t afraid. The man has left the book open on the page he was reading. He was planning to continue. He didn’t throw the book aside or protect his children or search for some object with which to defend his family. No. They’re all here together. The four of them. It doesn’t look as if their bodies were dragged here. No, the bodies haven’t been moved. But there’s something that draws my attention.” Lúa was all ears. I am quite sure had someone stuck a needle in her at that moment, she wouldn’t even have flinched. “The broken windowpanes, the vase on the floor, the picture, the lamp… there’s something that doesn’t fit. There was no jostling, no struggle, no fight. So why all this mess? Were they searching for something? Or did they want to fake a robbery? It’s a botched job. It was someone they knew, I’m sure of it. Who discovered the bodies? Who informed the police?”
“The milkman.”
“The milkman? You’re having me on.”
“No, they still have that custom here.”
“What’s this? Heidi’s village?”
“The milkman always brings one bottle in the morning and another before nightfall. It was he who informed the chancellor.”
“The chancellor?’
“Yes, it was the chancellor who called the police. Everything has to pass through the chancellor’s hands. He has a lot of power here. All the power, it seems to me.”
“Mmmmm… interesting.”
I foresaw a difficult case. From the very beginning, I’d had a premonition. “This is going to be bad. This is going to be long.” An icy serpent crawled up my back. Gothard is always hard. Autistic. Mute. A parenthesis in reality. Heading in another direction. They don’t make it easy. I’d thought I would never come back. For a long time, I’d wanted to believe it had all been a mirage, an illusion that only came to life in the deepest sleep, something that never existed. A utopia. The subconscious. Deformed images. But now it was coming back, as real as it had always been. The last time I’d set foot on Gothard had been to kill him. Bang! Explosion and bullet with the name of death written on it. The body tumbled like a rock down the jagged escarpment. On coming back to Gothard, memory came with me and together with that, unsurprisingly, came Anne Marie.
