The Book of Murder - By Guillermo Martinez & Sonia Soto Page 0,28

wound on his neck, possibly caused by a bite. The police had found the killer on the roof of the building, his mouth smeared with blood. When they managed to unclench his fist they found he was gripping the doctor’s eyeballs, crushed to a pulp. In his statement he said he had wanted to throw them in his wife’s face before killing her.

I looked for the next day’s paper. The story now occupied over half a page. It turned out that the arrested man had already been sentenced to life in a high security prison, but nobody could explain how he’d got out. There was a photograph of him looking straight at the camera, eyes empty of all expression, probably his police mug shot: a wide forehead, bald with narrow strips of hair above his ears, a sharp nose, plain ordinary features that gave no hint of murder or butchery. The post-mortem had revealed a few more details. The murderer had used only his hands and teeth; the victim had barely resisted, failing to land a single blow. The killer was famous in prison for letting his nails grow long, and had already blinded another inmate in a fight. It hadn’t been established whether the doctor had still been conscious when he’d had his eyes gouged out. In any case the cause of death was severing of the jugular vein. The report also stated that the doctor had been having an affair with the convict’s wife, whom he’d met when she was visiting her husband in prison, but there was no mention of the anonymous letters Luciana had told me about.

I looked at the next day’s paper. The story had now reached the front page. Apparently the inmate hadn’t escaped, he had been let out by guards to commit a burglary. The Ministry of the Interior had intervened and the head of the prison service was expected to resign imminently. The investigation had changed hands and was now being conducted by the same Superintendent Ramoneda that Luciana had mentioned. Even so, as I read this article—by far the longest—I felt that the trail was fading; that, as in the children’s game, I was getting cold. No, this definitely wasn’t what I thought I’d glimpsed. There was something earlier which I had missed again as I read. I took the first day’s article to the photocopier and then I went to one of the desks and set out all three copied stories. I read them again, one after the other. Almost nothing seemed to connect them, other than Luciana’s account. The dates were unevenly spaced: the first two incidents had taken place within a year, but the third had occurred three years later, and now four years had elapsed since anything had happened. There seemed, at any rate, to be a slowing of the pace of killing. Nor was there any obvious pattern linking them, discernible ‘from the outside’. There was even an aesthetic inconsistency: if the first two cases were to a certain extent reminiscent of the kind of subtle murder Kloster devised in his novels, the third—brutal, bloody—was quite unlike his style, his literary style at least. Though it might, of course, be part of the plan, and an obvious precaution for some of the deaths to be very different from those in his books. I recalled Luciana’s anxious voice the first time she called me: nobody knows, nobody realises. No, nobody knew, nobody realised, though all three cases had been in the papers, though the deaths were there, in plain sight, and one of them had caused quite a scandal. But was there really nothing to link them? A moment earlier, I thought I’d seen something, something that now eluded me but was nevertheless still there. Suddenly I thought I had the answer, though it didn’t seem to be of much use. It was something Luciana had said when describing her brother’s death. With his bare hands. The article on the first day also mentioned it: the killer had put down his gun and used only his hands and teeth. I sensed that this was it but, as if the scarcely glimpsed figure had once again melted away, I still couldn’t fully see the connection. And what significance, if any, did it have? Even if I accepted that Kloster was behind the deaths, even if I accepted that he had written the anonymous letters, of which there was no mention in the articles, there didn’t seem to be