The Flanders Panel (12 page)

“That’s four pawns, one rook and a bishop.” Munoz looked thoughtfully at the sketch. “When you look at the game from that point of view, White would seem to have an advantage over his opponent. But, if I’ve understood correctly, that’s not the problem. The question is who took the white knight. Clearly it must have been one of the black pieces, which may seem to be stating the obvious, but we have to go step by step here, right from the beginning.” He looked at Cesar and Julia as if what he’d said required some apology. “There’s nothing more misleading than an obvious fact. That’s a principle from logic which is equally applicable in chess: what seems obvious doesn’t always turn out to be what really happened or what is about to happen. To sum up: this means that we have to find out which of the black pieces on or off the board took the white knight.”

“Or killed him,” added Julia.

Munoz made an evasive gesture.

“That’s not my business, Senorita.”

“You can call me Julia, if you like.”

“Well, Julia, it’s still not my business.” He looked hard at the paper containing the sketch as if written on it was the script of a conversation of which he’d lost the thread. “I believe you brought me here to tell you which chess piece took the white knight. If by finding that out, the two of you are able to draw certain conclusions or decipher some hieroglyph, that’s fine.” He looked at them with more assurance, as often happened when he’d concluded a technical exegesis, as if he drew some measure of confidence from his knowledge. “That’s up to you. I’m just a chess player.”

Cesar found this reasonable.

“I can’t see anything wrong with that,” he said, looking at Julia. “He makes the moves and we interpret them. Teamwork, my dear.”

Julia was too interested in the whole problem to bother with details about method. She put her hand on Cesar’s, feeling the soft, regular beat of his pulse beneath the skin on his wrist.

“How long will it take to solve?”

Munoz scratched his ill-shaven chin.

“I don’t know. Half an hour, a week. It depends.”

“On what?”

“On a lot of things. On how well I manage to concentrate. And on luck.”

“Can you start right now?”

“Of course. I already have.”

“Go on then.”

But at that moment the phone rang, and the game of chess had to be postponed.

*****

Much later, Julia said she’d known at once what it was about, but she herself acknowledged how easy it is to say such things
a posteriori.
She also said that it was then she realised how terribly complicated everything was becoming. In fact, as she soon found out, the complications had started long before, tying themselves into solid knots, although at that point the most unpleasant aspects of the affair had not yet emerged. To be strictly accurate, it could be said that the complications began in 1469, when that man with a crossbow, an obscure pawn whose name is lost to posterity, positioned himself by the moat of Ostenburg Castle to wait, with the patience of a hunter, for the man to pass whose death had been bought with the gold coins jingling in his pocket.

At first the policeman didn’t seem too unpleasant, given the circumstances and given that he was a policeman, although the fact that he belonged to the Art Investigation Squad didn’t seem to mark him out much from his colleagues. His professional relationship with the world in which he worked had left him with, at most, a certain affectation in the way he said “Good morning” or “Sit down”, and in the way he knotted his tie. He spoke very slowly and unemphatically and kept nodding unnecessarily. Julia could not decide if it was a professional tic intended to inspire confidence or was part of the pretence that he knew exactly what was going on. He was short and fat, sported a strange Mexican-style moustache and was dressed entirely in brown. As regards art, Inspector Feijoo considered himself, modestly, to be an enthusiast: he was a collector of antique knives.

Julia learned all this in an office in the police station on Paseo del Prado after Feijoo’s description of some of the details of Alvaro’s death. The fact that Professor Ortega had been found in his bathtub with a broken neck, presumably from slipping while taking a shower, was most regrettable. The body had been discovered by the cleaner. But the distressing part - and Feijoo weighed his words carefully before giving Julia a sorrowful look, as if inviting her to consider the tragedy of the human condition - was that the forensic examination had revealed certain disquieting details, and it was impossible to determine with any exactitude whether the death had been accidental or provoked. In other words, there was the possibility - the Inspector repeated the word “possibility” twice - that the fracture at the base of the skull had been caused by a blow from a solid object other than the edge of the bathtub.

“You mean,” Julia said, leaning on the table, “that someone might have killed him while he was taking a shower?”

The policeman adopted an expression doubtless intended to dissuade her from going too far.

“I only mention that as a possibility. The initial inspection and the first autopsy, generally speaking, confirm the theory of accidental death.”

“Generally speaking? What are you trying to say?”

“I’m trying to tell you the facts. There are certain details, such as the type of fracture, the position of the body - technical details I would prefer not to go into - which give rise to some perplexity, to certain reasonable doubts.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I’m almost inclined to agree with you,” he said, the Mexican moustache taking on the form of a sympathetic circumflex. “But if those doubts were confirmed, the situation would look very different: Professor Ortega would have been killed by a blow to the back of the neck. Then, after undressing him, someone could have put him under the shower and turned on the taps, to make it look like an accident. A new forensic study is being carried out to look into the possibility that the dead man was struck twice, not once; a first blow to knock him out and a second to make sure he was dead.” He sat back in his chair, folded his hands and looked at her placidly. “Naturally, that’s only a hypothesis.”

Julia stared at him, like someone who believes herself to be the butt of a practical joke. She couldn’t take in what she’d heard; she was unable to establish a link between Alvaro and what Feijoo was suggesting. A voice deep inside her was whispering that this was obviously a case of the wrong roles being given to the wrong people; he must be talking about someone else entirely. It was absurd to imagine Alvaro, the Alvaro she had known, murdered, like a rabbit, by a blow to the back of the neck, lying naked, his eyes wide open, beneath a shower of icy water. It was stupid, grotesque.

“Let’s assume for a moment,” she said, “that the death wasn’t accidental. Who would have wanted to kill him?”

“That, as they say in the films, is a very good question.” The policeman bit his lower lip in a gesture of professional caution. “To be honest, I haven’t the slightest idea.” He paused and adopted an air intended to convey that he was placing all his cards on the table. “In fact, I’m relying 0n your help to clear up the matter.”

“On my help? Why?”

The Inspector looked Julia up and down with deliberate slowness. He was no longer being nice, and his look revealed a certain crude self-interest, as if he were trying to establish some kind of obscure complicity between them.

“You had a relationship with the dead man… Forgive me, but mine is an unpleasant job,” he said, although, judging by the self-satisfied smile that appeared beneath the moustache, he didn’t seem to be finding his job particularly unpleasant. He put his hand in his pocket and drew out a box of matches bearing the name of a four-star restaurant and, with a gesture intended to be gallant, lit the cigarette Julia had just placed between her lips. “I mean an… um… affair. Is that correct?”

“That’s correct.” Julia exhaled, half-closing her eyes, embarrassed and angry. An affair, the policeman had just said, summing up with great simplicity a piece of her life whose scars were still raw. And no doubt, she thought, that fat, vulgar man, with his ridiculous moustache, was weighing up the quality of the goods. The victim’s girlfriend’s a nice bit of stuff, he’d tell his colleagues when he went down to the canteen for a beer. I wouldn’t mind doing her the odd favour.

But she was more concerned about other aspects of her situation. Alvaro was dead, possibly murdered. Absurd as it might seem, she was in a police station, and there were too many unknowns. And not understanding certain things could prove dangerous.

Her whole body was tense, alert, on the defensive. She looked at Feijoo, who was now neither compassionate nor kindly. It was a question of tactics, she said to herself. Trying to remain calm, she decided that there really wasn’t any reason the Inspector should be considerate towards her. He was just a policeman, as clumsy and coarse as the next one, merely doing his job. Anyway, she thought, as she tried to see the situation from his point of view: she was all he had, the only lead, the dead man’s ex-girlfriend.

“But that’s ancient history,” she said, letting the ash from her cigarette fall into the pristine ashtray full of paper clips that Feijoo had on his desk. “We stopped seeing each other over a year ago… as I’m sure you know.”

The Inspector put his elbows on the desk and leaned towards her.

“Yes,” he said, almost confidentially, as if his tone were irrefutable proof that they were old acquaintances now and that he was entirely on her side. “But you did have a meeting with him three days ago.”

Julia managed to conceal her surprise and merely looked at the policeman with the expression of someone who’s just heard an exceptionally foolish remark. Naturally, Feijoo had been making enquiries at the university. Any secretary or porter could have told him. But neither was it something she needed to hide.

“I went to ask for his help on a painting I’m restoring.” She found it odd that the policeman wasn’t taking notes, but assumed that was part of his method: people speak more freely when they think their words are disappearing into thin air. “As you are apparently well aware, we talked for nearly an hour in his office. We even arranged to meet later, but I never saw him again.”

Feijoo was turning the box of matches round and round.

“What did you talk about, if you don’t mind my asking? I’m sure you’ll understand and forgive such an… um… personal question. I assure you it’s purely routine.”

Julia regarded him in silence while she pulled on her cigarette and then she shook her head slowly.

“You seem to take me for some kind of idiot.”

The policeman looked at her through lowered eyelids but he sat a little straighter.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’ll tell you what I mean,” she said and stubbed out her cigarette hard in the little pile of paper clips, indifferent to the pained look with which he followed her gesture. “I have no objection whatsoever to answering your questions. But, before we go on, I want you to tell me if Alvaro slipped in the bath or not.”

Feijoo seemed to be caught off guard. “I have no firm evidence…”

“Then this conversation is unnecessary. If you think there is something suspicious about his death and you’re trying to get me to talk, I want to know right now whether I’m being questioned as a possible suspect. Because, in that case, either I leave this police station at once or I get a lawyer.”

The policeman raised his hands in conciliatory fashion.

“That would be a bit premature.” With a lopsided smile, he shuffled in his seat as if he were once again looking for the right words. “The official line, as of this moment, is that Professor Ortega had an accident.”

“And what if your marvellous pathologists decide otherwise?”

“In that case” - Feijoo waved his hand vaguely - “you will be considered no more suspicious than any of the other people who knew the deceased. You can imagine the list of candidates…”

“That’s the problem. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to kill Alvaro.”

“Well, that’s your opinion. I see it differently: suspended students, jealous colleagues, angry lovers, intransigent husbands…” He ticked these off with one thumb on the fingers of the other hand and stopped when he ran out of fingers. “No. The thing is, and I’m sure you’ll be the first to recognise this, your testimony will be extremely valuable.”

“Why? Are you putting me in the category of angry lovers?”

“I wouldn’t go that far, Senorita. But you did see him only hours before he, or someone else, fractured his skull.”

“Hours?” This time Julia really was disconcerted. “When did he die?”

“Three days ago. On Wednesday, between two in the afternoon and midnight.”

“That’s impossible. There must be a mistake.”

“A mistake?” the Inspector’s expression had changed. He was looking at Julia with open distrust now. “Certainly not. That’s the pathologist’s verdict.”

“There
must
be a mistake. An error of twenty-four hours.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because on Thursday evening, the day after my conversation with him, he sent me some documents I’d asked him for.”

“What sort of documents?”

“About the history of the painting I’m working on.”

“Did you receive them by post?”

“No, by messenger, that same evening.”

“Do you remember the name of the company?”

“Yes. Urbexpress. And it was on Thursday, around eight o’clock. How do you explain that?”

The policeman emitted a sceptical sigh from beneath his moustache.

“I can’t. By Thursday evening, Alvaro Ortega had already been dead for twenty-four hours, so he couldn’t have sent them. Someone…” — Feijoo paused briefly to allow Julia time to take in the idea - “someone must have done it for him.”

“Someone? But who?”

“The person who killed him, if he was killed that is. The hypothetical murderer. Or murderess.” He looked at Julia with some curiosity. “I don’t know why we always immediately assume it was a man who committed a crime.” Then he had an idea. “Was there a letter or a note accompanying the documents supposedly sent by Alvaro Ortega?”