“They gave me another one, and another one. To put it simply, it was like a sleep cure. Until I realised what I had to do if I wanted them to stop drugging me and get out of that place. I just had to make sure I never mentioned the K word.”
A tear of frustration ran down her cheek. She pulled off the latex gloves. Her hands, now reddened, were trembling even more than before.
“Well, I think I’ve told you the worst. But I wanted you to know everything. I was in hospital for two weeks and by the time I got out I’d learned my lesson: I never mentioned this to anyone again. More time passed-a whole year, then another. But I wasn’t fooled this time. I knew it was part of his plan that the deaths should be spaced out. Perhaps that was the worst part: the waiting. I stopped seeing my friends; I became isolated. I didn’t want anyone near me. I didn’t know where the next blow would come from. I was mainly terrified for Valentina. She was my responsibility by then as my brother had moved to a flat of his own. I hated leaving her alone even for a minute. The waiting that stretched on, living in suspense, the delay- it was unbearable. I tried to keep track of him in the papers, to find out the itineraries of his journeys in the news, where he could be. I only had a few days’ respite whenever I knew he was out of the country. Until finally it happened. I got a phone call from the police superintendent: a burglar had broken into my brother’s flat and killed him. My brother, who thought I’d lost my mind, was now dead. That was all the superintendent said but the gruesome details were already on the news. My brother hadn’t put up a fight, but the killer had been especially vicious, as if there was something more between them. He’d had a gun but had used his bare hands. He broke both my brother’s arms and gouged out his eyes. I think he did something even more horrible afterwards to the body, but I could never bring myself to read the pathologist’s report through to the end. When the police caught the man he still had my brother’s blood on his face.”
“I remember. I remember it quite clearly,” I said, amazed that I’d never made the connection. “He was a prisoner in a maximum security prison, and he got out to commit burglaries with the guards’ permission. Well, at least here it’s obvious it wasn’t Kloster.”
“It was Kloster,” she said, eyes blazing.
For a moment it all felt unreal. Her mouth was twisted angrily. She’d spoken with absolute conviction, with the dark determination of a fanatic, who will brook no contradiction. But a moment later she was crying quietly, pausing now and then as if the effort of having reached this point had exhausted her. She took a handkerchief from her bag, wringing it helplessly after wiping her eyes. Once she’d recovered, her voice was again controlled, oddly calm and distant.
“At the time, my brother was working in the prison hospital wing. Apparently this is where he met the convict’s wife. Unfortunately he became involved with her. They thought they were safe because the husband was serving a life sentence. They never dreamed that he had an arrangement with the guards to get out and burgle homes. It was a huge scandal in the prison service when it all came to light. The Internal Investigations Department had to carry out a detailed inquiry. That’s when they discovered the letters. Someone had been sending the prisoner anonymous letters, giving details of his wife’s meetings with my brother. The letters were in the court record so I was able to see them. The handwriting had been disguised. And there were deliberate spelling and grammatical mistakes. But I took dictation from Kloster for almost a year and he couldn’t fool me. It was his style-precise, calculating, full of humiliating details. Intended line by line to drive the man crazy. The scenes…the physical scenes were probably made up, but the letters gave very precise descriptions of the bar where they met, the clothes she wore each time, how the two of them made fun of him. Those letters were the real murder weapon. And whoever wrote them was the true murderer.”
“Did you tell the police any of this at the time?”
“I asked to speak to the officer in charge of the case, Superintendent Ramoneda. At first he was very pleasant and seemed willing to listen. I told him everything: about my suing Kloster, Ramiro’s death, my parents’ poisoning, the clues that it was Kloster who wrote the anonymous letters. He listened without saying a word, but I realised he didn’t like the direction things might go in if he decided to take me seriously. After all, for them it was an open-and-shut case. I think he was afraid he might be accused, in the midst of all the scandal, of wanting to absolve the prison service. He asked if I understood the gravity of my accusation and the absolute absence of proof in all that I’d told him. He took down Kloster’s details anyway and said he’d send one of his men to speak to him. A couple of days later I got a call summoning me back to his office. I could tell immediately that something had changed. His tone was both fatherly and slightly threatening. He said that because it was such a delicate matter and there was so much at stake he’d decided to go and see Kloster himself-he had to follow every lead, however absurd. Kloster, he said, had been very courteous-he was about to leave for a reception at the French embassy but had made time. He didn’t tell me about the interview itself but it was obvious that Kloster had impressed him. I’ve no doubt they ended up talking about his novels. Before I could say anything he produced a sheet of paper in my handwriting and laid it on the desk. I recognised it at once: it was the letter I sent Kloster after my parents died. A letter in which I asked his forgiveness for having sued him.”
“You sent Kloster a letter of apology? You didn’t mention it.”
“It was when I came out of hospital. I was confused and terrified. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life waiting for everyone close to me to die. I thought that if I asked for forgiveness humbly, pleaded and took all the blame, he’d stop. It was a mistake made in a moment of desperation. But when I tried to explain this to the superintendent he took out another document: the admission form for the psychiatric clinic where I was given the sleep cure. He said he’d had to make inquiries about me too. From his tone, he made it clear he thought he had my measure and wasn’t prepared to waste any more time on me. He asked if I realised that with the same lack of proof somebody sufficiently imaginative, or deranged, might also accuse me. Then he went back to a fatherly tone and advised me to accept that my boyfriend’s death had simply been a careless accident, my parents’ a tragedy, and there was nothing more to it. They’d caught my brother’s killer and this was indeed quite another matter: surely I hadn’t forgotten that they’d caught the brute with my brother’s blood around his mouth? Did I want them to let him go and instead pursue a writer awarded the Grand Cross of the Legion d’honneur with whom I’d had a personal problem of some sort several years ago? He stood up and said he couldn’t help me any further but there was a public prosecutor on the case if I wanted to take my stories to him.”
“But you didn’t,” I said.
She looked defeated. “No, I didn’t,” she said.
She lapsed into a long helpless silence, as if now that she’d told me everything she had retreated further into herself. She sat hunched in the armchair, hands with fingers interlaced in her lap, jerking her head and shoulders back and forth in small compulsive movements. She looked on the verge of shivering.
“Don’t you have any other relatives who could help you?”
She shook her head, slowly, resignedly. “All that’s left of my family is my grandmother Margarita. She’s been in an old people’s home for years. And my sister, Valentina, who’s still at school.”