The Book of Murder - By Guillermo Martinez & Sonia Soto Page 0,23

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