Ramiro’s death wasn’t enough.”
She looked once more across the street while feeling in her pocket for a handkerchief. She glanced at her watch again and dried her eyes.
“Maybe not,” I admitted. “But he claims that since that day all he’s done about it is write his novel. A novel in which you and he are characters. He assured me he hasn’t seen you since then and that he only found out your parents had died when he got your letter.”
She shook her head, still looking out of the window. “That’s a lie: he was at the cemetery the day of their funeral.”
“I asked him about that: he goes there every day to visit his daughter’s grave. He claims not to have seen you.”
She turned to look at me angrily. “I suppose I shouldn’t have expected him to admit anything. And he seems to have a lie ready for everything.”
“Actually what I found most disconcerting was that he seemed to be telling the truth. He talked as if he had nothing to hide. He even told me something he could have kept secret, about your brother’s death, something we didn’t know: he did correspond with inmates of that prison at various times. He said the police had looked into it and that he gave Superintendent Ramoneda any letters he’d kept.”
“But there might have been other letters that he got rid of—that he made sure to get rid of,” Luciana interrupted. “He could have found out from other inmates that that prisoner got out to commit robberies. And if he’d followed my brother and knew he was involved with that woman, all he had to do was send the anonymous letters to goad the killer on. Kloster wrote them. I knew it as soon as I saw them. He can’t fool me.”
“He said he and Ramoneda talked about crime fiction and that at one point the superintendent showed him the anonymous letters and asked him what kind of person he thought could have written them. Apparently the superintendent thought it was more likely it was you.”
She sat in silence for a moment, her hands trembling helplessly.
“Don’t you see?” she murmured. “Don’t you see how he twists everything and turns everyone against me? I suppose he tried to make you believe it was me?”
“Actually, no, he didn’t. That’s what I found most surprising. He seems to think there’s another possibility. I suppose it’s what he’s writing about in his novel. He said I’d never believe it.”
“There is no other explanation: it’s him. I don’t understand how you can still doubt it. He’ll go on and on, until I’m all alone. Until I’m the last one left. That’s the revenge he’s after. The one he marked in the Bible: seven for one. And now Valentina is in there at this moment. In there with him. I’ll never forgive myself if something happens to her. I don’t think I can wait any longer,” she said, making as if to stand. I stopped her.
“When I mentioned that section in the Bible he said it was wrong to interpret it that way. That the number seven is actually a symbol of completeness, of the perfectly finished. The vengeance that God reserves for himself. Even if it is Kloster behind the deaths, maybe the punishment is complete.”
“In the novel about that sect that he was dictating to me, the number seven wasn’t symbolic. They killed seven members of a family one by one. That’s what he’s been planning for me from the beginning and that’s why he never had that novel published, so as not to give himself away. Did you ask why he was standing outside my grandmother’s nursing home?”
I shook my head. “I couldn’t very well subject him to an interrogation,” I said, a little irritably. “I just tried to get him to talk. And I think I did pretty well.”
Something in my voice made her back down, as if she realised for the first time that she’d asked too much of me.
“I’m sorry. You’re right,” she said. “How did you get him to see you?”
“I said I was writing a novel about the strange series of deaths around you, and I wanted to hear his version of events. I thought it was also a way of letting him know that somebody else is aware of what’s happening to you.”
I realised Luciana was no longer listening to me. She was watching Kloster’s front door.
“Thank God,” she murmured. “I can see her. She’s just come out of