MargenThe shots lasted less time than the surprise. Two dry cracks, no echo, silenced. Anglada threw herself to the floor on instinct, rolled to the bar and drew her weapon, but when she lifted her head there was nobody in the doorway. Only Estivill, still sitting in his chair, his head tipped forward like a man who has fallen asleep in the middle of a sentence, and a dark flower spreading across his shirt.
The car outside was gone. They had come for him, not for her. They had left her alive on purpose, and that was the answer she had spent four chapters of her life refusing to see: if they were leaving her alive, it was because somebody wanted her useful. A confused witness. A broken sister stirring the mud exactly where it suited somebody for the mud to be stirred.
She went back over it, fast, the way you go back over things while falling. Who had access to her house without forcing the door. Who knew the file in detail. Who had told her, in that patient voice, that Estivill signed off the containers that were never opened, handing her precisely the thread to pull. Who had spent three weeks at her side, orderly and serene, walking her step by step out to that breakwater.
Bru. The patient subinspector. The one who loved order the way other men love drink.
She had no proof. She had something worse: the cold certainty of someone who at last sees the whole picture and understands that she had been inside it from the beginning. Bru worked for what was left of Restany's network. The courier without hands had come to warn her that her brother was still alive, and that threatened to reopen a port that had been sealed shut for twenty years. Estivill was the last man who could tell the whole truth. Now he could not.
Anglada stood up. She holstered her weapon. She looked one last time at Estivill, at the man who was going to marry her and who perhaps, in his own cowardly way, had been trying to protect her all his life. Then she walked out onto the breakwater. The sea was calm, indifferent, with that patience belonging to things that always win.
In her pocket she had the photograph. Herself, twenty years younger. Her brother in the background. And now she knew that Aleix was alive in some port in another country, under another name, waiting for two decades for a signal to tell him he could come home.
Anglada took out her phone. She dialled Bru's number. She needed to hear his voice one more time, now that she knew, to be certain. The subinspector answered on the second ring, calm, orderly, the same as ever.
"Nuria. Are you all right? You had me worried."
"I am fine," she said, and her own voice sounded foreign to her, harder, older. "Bru, come out to the breakwater. There is a body. And we have a great deal to talk about."
She hung up before he could answer. The port, she thought, always keeps what is its own. But this time, for the first time in twenty years, she had decided that it was hers. And she walked towards the headlamps to wait for the man who was going to have to look her in the face while he lied. The tide was starting to come in.