Chapter 1. The Ebb Tide Always Gives Something Back

The body had been in the water two days and even so Inspector Nuria Anglada knew its hands were missing before they pulled it out. She knew it from the way it floated, crooked, without the gravity that ten fingers give as they drag a man towards the bottom. Those who want to hide a name start with the hands. Then the teeth. This one still had teeth, so someone had been in a hurry, or had a bad conscience.

The old dock smelled of diesel, of rotting seaweed and of that metallic cold the port kept even in June. The crane operators had stopped their machines. A young municipal officer was vomiting discreetly behind a container, and Anglada let him get on with it without looking at him, because at twenty-five she had vomited too and no one had thrown it in her face.

"No hands, no wallet, nothing," said the coroner, Cardona, crouched beside the stretcher. "A ghost. You are going to have a hard time putting a name to him."

"We always put a name to them," she answered. "Late. But we do."

It was Cardona himself who found the inside pocket, sewn with a care that did not match the cheap clothes. Inside, wrapped in clear plastic and folded in four, was a photograph. He opened it with two gloved fingers and stayed silent for longer than a coroner stays silent.

"Nuria," he said, and it was strange for him to call her by her first name. "I think this one is for you."

It was her. Twenty years younger, her hair not yet cut short, laughing at something she no longer remembered, on quay number four. The night of the fourteenth of August. The last night her brother Aleix was alive, or at least the last on which anyone could swear to having seen him.

Anglada did not take the photo. She pushed her hands into her coat pockets because she did not want Cardona to see them shaking, and looked at the black water of the dock as if the sea might give her back an explanation too. The tide was going out. The ebb tide, she told herself, always gives something back.

What she did not know yet was that the man without hands had come looking for her. And that he had been dead for exactly as long as it had taken her to decide to come back to the port after twenty years.