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

I took my leave with a quick nod and headed for the exit. As I walked away I heard him putting another sugar lump in his mouth and crunching it between his teeth.

…

When I turned into the Ramblas I noticed that the canopies outside the Liceo were lit up and a long row of cars, guarded by a small regiment of chauffeurs in uniform, was waiting by the pavement. The posters announced Così fan tutte and I wondered if Vidal had felt like forsaking his castle to attend. I scanned the circle of drivers that had formed on the central pavement and soon spotted Pep among them. I beckoned him over.

“What are you doing here, Señor Martín?”

“Where is she?”

“Señor Vidal is inside, watching the performance.”

“Not ‘he.’ ‘She.’ Cristina. Señora de Vidal. Where is she?”

Poor Pep swallowed hard.

“I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

He told me that Vidal had been attempting to find her and that his father, the patriarch of the clan, had even hired various members of the police force to try to discover where she was.

“At first, Señor Vidal thought she was with you …”

“Hasn’t she called or sent a letter, a telegram … ?”

“No, Señor Martín. I swear. We’re all very worried, and Señor Vidal, well … I’ve never seen him like this in all the years I’ve known him. This is the first time he’s gone out since Señorita Cristina, I mean Señora Cristina—”

“Do you remember whether Cristina said something, anything, before she left Villa Helius?”

“Well …” said Pep, lowering his voice to a whisper. “You could hear her arguing with Señor Vidal. She seemed sad to me. She spent a lot of time by herself. She wrote letters and every day she went to the post office in Paseo Reina Elisenda to post them.”

“Did you ever speak to her alone?”

“One day, shortly before she left, Señor Vidal asked me to drive her to the doctor.”

“Was she ill?”

“She couldn’t sleep. The doctor prescribed laudanum.”

“Did she say anything to you on the way there?”

Pep hesitated.

“She asked after you, in case I’d heard from you or seen you.”

“Is that all?”

“She just seemed very sad. She started to cry, and when I asked her what was the matter she said she missed her father, Señor Manuel.”

I suddenly understood, berating myself for not having figured things out sooner. Pep looked at me in surprise and asked me why I was smiling.

“Do you know where she is?” he asked.

“I think so,” I murmured.

I thought I could hear a voice calling from the other side of the street and glimpsed a familiar figure in the Liceo foyer. Vidal hadn’t even managed to last the first act. Pep turned to attend to his master’s call, and before he had time to tell me to hide I had already disappeared into the night.

6

Even from afar it looked like bad news: the ember of a cigarette in the blue of the night, silhouettes leaning against a dark wall, the spiraling breath of three figures lying in wait by the main door of the tower house. Inspector Víctor Grandes, accompanied by his two guard dogs Marcos and Castelo, led the welcome committee. It wasn’t hard to work out that they’d found Alicia Marlasca’s body at the bottom of her pool in Sarriá and that my place on their list had gone up a few notches. The minute I caught sight of them I stopped and melted into the shadows, observing them for a few seconds to make sure they hadn’t noticed me—I was only some fifty meters away. I could distinguish Grandes’s profile in the thin light shed by the streetlamp on the wall. Retreating into the darkness, I slipped into the first alleyway I could find, disappearing into the mass of passages and arches of the Ribera quarter.