The Book of Murder - By Guillermo Martinez & Sonia Soto Page 0,24
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.”
“What happened after that? It’s been a few years since your brother died, hasn’t it?”
“Four. He’s letting time pass again. These periods are torture. I almost never leave the flat, and I watch Valentina constantly. I’ve become obsessive about crossroads, and locks, and turning off the gas. But I can’t control Valentina completely any more. I can’t stop her going out with her friends sometimes. My God, sometimes I even follow her without her knowing, to make sure he’s not after her. I only visit my grandmother once a week, on Saturday afternoons, but I’ve left written instructions not to allow in any visitors except Valentina and me. I’m scared he’ll get in there under a pretext, in disguise…”