The Angel's Game (The Cemetery of Forgotten 2)

“More than suspicions. Has anyone told you how Marlasca died?”

“All I know is that people said it was an accident.”

“Marlasca died by drowning. At least, that’s what the police report said.”

“How did he drown?”

“There’s only one way of drowning, but I’ll come back to that later. The curious thing is where he drowned.”

“In the sea?”

Salvador smiled. It was a dark, bitter smile, like the coffee that was brewing.

“Are you sure you want to hear this?”

“I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.”

He handed me a cup and looked me up and down, assessing me.

“I assume you’ve visited that son of a bitch Valera.”

“If you mean Marlasca’s partner, he’s dead. The one I spoke to was his son.”

“Another son of a bitch, except he has less guts. I don’t know what he told you, but I’m sure he didn’t say that between them they managed to get me thrown out of the police force and turned me into a pariah who couldn’t even beg for money in the streets.”

“I’m afraid he forgot to include that in his version of events,” I conceded.

“It doesn’t surprise me.”

“You were going to tell me how Marlasca drowned.”

“That’s where it gets interesting,” said Salvador. “Did you know that Señor Marlasca, apart from being a lawyer, a scholar, and a writer, had, as a young man, won the annual Christmas swim across the port organized by the Barcelona Swimming Club?”

“How can a champion swimmer drown?” I asked.

“The question is where did he drown. Señor Marlasca’s body was found in the pond on the roof of the water reservoir building in Ciudadela Park. Do you know the place?”

I swallowed and nodded. It was there that I first encountered Corelli.

“If you know it, you’ll know that when it’s full it’s barely a meter deep. It’s essentially a basin. The day the lawyer was found dead, the reservoir was half empty and the water level was no more than sixty centimeters.”

“A champion swimmer doesn’t drown in sixty centimeters of water, just like that,” I observed.

“That’s what I said to myself.”

“Were there other points of view?”

“For a start, it’s doubtful whether he drowned at all. The pathologist who carried out the autopsy found water in the lungs, but his report said that death had occurred as a result of heart failure.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When Marlasca fell into the pond, or when he was pushed, he was on fire. His body had severe burns on the torso, arms, and face. According to the pathologist, the body could have been on fire for almost a minute before it came into contact with the water. The remains of the lawyer’s clothes showed the presence of some type of solvent on the fabrics. Marlasca was burned alive.”

It took me a few minutes to digest all this.

“Why would anyone want to do something like that?”

“A settling of scores? Pure cruelty? You choose. My opinion is that somebody wanted to delay the identification of Marlasca’s body in order to gain time and confuse the police.”