DRINKS ON THE CAMPUS VIDA
21 January 2017
Santiago de Compostela
On the left of the photo were Mariana, Roi and his cousin Lois who had also studied Medicine. There were three other people stood with their arms draped around each other’s shoulders: a blonde girl Iago hadn’t seen before, Martín and David de la Riba, a party animal through and through who would go on lots of nights out with the group back then. Kneeling down, in front of them, were two other pretty girls Iago couldn’t identify.
The supermarket bags and the bottles on the floor to the left of the photo as well as the student halls in the background helped Iago place the photo towards the end of his degree. The fact that Lois, who was two years younger than them, had been there made it impossible the photo could have been taken during Iago’s first years at university.
In the folder “KB”, Iago found a couple of newspaper clippings from 2002 and 2003 about how the General Hospital of Galeras was closing and moving to Vidán. But what really caught his attention were the screenshots and links to news stories in local newspapers about the death of Kathrin Brinkmann, a German student who had been on an Erasmus year in Santiago in October 2002.
Iago cast an eye over all the headlines that had been published in the local papers about an event he couldn’t remember happening. The sparse text in the news stories only gave a few details about how a young woman’s body had appeared a few metres from the oak trees in San Lourenzo, semi-submerged next to the riverbank where the Sarela is little more than a small stream. Someone who lived in the area realised she was there after his dog discovered a body off the beaten track, past the bridge that’s at the bottom of the hill at Cano and near some of the old houses whose outside walls are still standing, covered in moss.
The fact the body was still dressed and there weren’t any visible signs of violence, beyond what one would expect from falling into a river, meant it was easy to think, in the first instance, that this had been a fatal accident. With a sexual motive ruled out, the high concentration of alcohol in Kathrin’s blood and the fact her girlfriends’ statements all corroborated each other, the investigation was closed quite quickly. From what Iago could glean from the short news stories published just a few weeks later, all of Kathrin’s friends had said she’d decided to go off on her own back to the university halls at Monte da Condesa after she’d had too much to drink and started to feel sick. This all indicated that her falling into the stream had been no more than a simple accident, a tragic end to a drunken night gone wrong. Kathrin’s parents only went to Compostela to collect their daughter’s body so they could bury her in Germany and didn’t spend a minute longer in the city than was strictly necessary to arrange all the paperwork.
Only in one of the articles published around the time in El Correo Gallego was there a small picture of the Erasmus student and Iago immediately identified her as the same blonde girl that had appeared in the photo of the drunken night, stood between Roi and Martín. To confirm the very small doubts he had, he opened the picture on the pen drive again and saw Kathrin was smiling, leaning on his friend Martín’s arm.
Apart from those short articles that had appeared in local newspapers towards the end of October 2002, what happened to Kathrin Brinkmann had hardly received any attention at all, which explained in part why Iago, who around that time had just left for Germany, didn’t know about the case.
What seemed even stranger to him was that his friend had never spoken to him at all about what happened. As he looked back at the photograph, Iago asked himself if he actually wanted to know the truth behind all this mess, which was starting to seem really quite sinister to him.
