MargenEstivill agreed to meet her in a bar out on the breakwater, one of those places that only open for fishermen and for people who need to talk where there are no cameras. He had aged badly, with the ageing of a man who sleeps little and with the lights on. When he saw her come in, he did not smile. Cowards who have been brave once in their lives do not smile.
"I knew you would come," he said. "As soon as I heard about the body. It had to be a matter of days."
"Tell me about my brother. And do not lie to me, Marc, because I have learned to smell your lies from the other side of the city."
He told her a version that almost fitted. That Aleix worked as a docker and one night saw what he should not have seen: a container that instead of machine parts was carrying people, fourteen of them, and two who were no longer breathing. That Aleix threatened to talk. That Restany and his men decided a docker with a conscience is a loose end. And that he, Estivill, to save his life, manufactured him a new name and got him out of the country in the same kind of container he had been going to report.
"They did not kill him," said Estivill. "We disappeared him so they would not kill him. I gave him an identity and a ticket and I made him swear he would never come back. And he did not come back. For twenty years he did not come back."
"Until now."
"Until now." Estivill passed a hand over his face. "The dead man in the dock was the courier. The man Aleix sent every now and then to find out whether you were all right. They cut off his hands because he was carrying the only proof that Aleix is still alive: that photograph. Somebody does not want your brother to come back, Nuria. And now that you are stirring it all up, that somebody does not want you either."
It almost fitted. It fitted so well that it hurt her. But she had been a police officer for twenty years and something in that story was too tidy, too neatly arranged to console her. A truth used as bait is still a hook.
"Why did you have the photograph," she said slowly. "The original. You were in my house. You wrote he is alive on the back. How did you come to have the photograph the dead man was carrying, Marc, if it was stolen off him?"
Estivill went pale. He opened his mouth. And at that moment the lights of the bar went out all at once, and through the window Anglada saw the headlamps of a car that had been parked outside far too long, with its engine running, at high tide, on a breakwater where nobody ever parked.