NO OBITUARY IN THE NEWSPAPER

21 January 2017

Santiago de Compostela

The alarm on Iago’s phone woke him up and as soon as he switched off airplane mode, he received a message from Clara, his friend’s sister: “Hi Iago, Silvia told me you’re in Santiago. Thanks for coming”, 4:23.

Judging from the time Clara had sent the message, Iago imagined she’d been up late and hadn’t been able to sleep all night long. He did the maths and calculated that Clara would be about thirty by now. Though they’d known each other since they were small and had seen each other grow up, they’d never been friends beyond knowing each other through Martín, Clara’s older brother, who had lived with his sister in their grandparents’ flat in the Ensanche district for years. Iago took her short message as an invitation to call her, ask how she was and find out how her parents were doing too.

Before replying, Iago got up and went to read the newspaper in the kitchen, stopping to make himself a cup of coffee which turned out to have been poured already and seemed to be waiting for him. He didn’t find anything about his friend on the front page or in the local section either. Without really knowing why, the fact that the press was ignoring Martín’s death for the second day running reinstilled a sense of calm in him. Yet, as soon as he turned to the obituary pages and saw there was nothing about his friend there, not a word about his death or funeral, he couldn’t stop himself imagining a couple of forensic medics splitting open Martín’s body so they could carry out an autopsy on it.

Iago quickly decided it was likely details about Martín’s death hadn’t been made public yet due to legal restrictions that would have been agreed between the municipal and autonomous governments, both of which would have had little interest in sparking fear, encouraging tourists to pack their bags or for the city to start being depicted negatively in media outlets across the whole country. That any morbid details were able to be kept from the press was surely not going to last for long, but for now at least it put a block on journalists from all over Spain becoming so interested in the case that they made Martín’s family’s life impossible. It also meant his funeral wasn’t about to turn into a media frenzy.

Overnight, Iago woke up on several occasions asking himself what could possibly be in the envelope his friend had supposedly left for him in a café on the university campus. With Martín now dead, he very reasonably wondered whether it would be dangerous for him to go and pick up the message. The fact the people responsible for Martín’s death could have taken his phone and had a chance to read his message could well justify why Martín had cautiously written “the place where you met Mariana” since this would prevent (or at least make it a lot more difficult) for someone to know exactly where the envelope was. Mariana was one of Iago’s old girlfriends who had married a Brazilian engineer and lived in Salvador de Bahia for years. Iago firmly believed she had nothing at all to do with what was going on and that his friend had used her name so he could get away without saying exactly where he’d left the envelope. There was also the added bonus that Mariana wasn’t exactly easy to find if someone did want to try and get that information from her.

Iago also kept thinking back to the post Martín had shared on Facebook about the hospital in Galeras. What could that have been about? Who was that message, launched into the void as it was on a social network, intended for?

Iago thought about telling the police, which would probably have been the most sensible option, but he figured Martín must have had a strong reason for not doing so since he hadn’t spoken to them himself. Iago’s head spun round and round until he finally decided to get in touch with the police just as soon as he’d figured out what was inside the envelope and was sure what his friend’s reasons for not speaking to the police had been.

That’s when he’d call Clara and tell her everything he knew.