The Book of Murder - By Guillermo Martinez & Sonia Soto Page 0,64

could tell immediately. I was beginning to understand his methods, his preferences: the wild sea waves, the natural poison of fungi, the cruelty of one man attacking another like a beast with claws and teeth, as at the dawn of time. A few days later that policeman, Ramoneda, came to see me and showed me the anonymous letters. They were uncouth but precise, and effective. I almost told him everything, as I’m telling you now. But he had his own theory. He spotted a book by Poe on my bookshelves and started talking about The Tell-Tale Heart, of the desire to confess that he’d seen again and again in murderers. I realised from the way he spoke about Luciana that he suspected her. He asked if I had any samples of her handwriting. I gave him the letter she had sent me a few years earlier, in which she asked for forgiveness. He read it carefully and while he was comparing the handwriting he confided that Luciana had spent time in hospital, with a syndrome known as ‘morbid guilt’. Sufferers secretly feel guilty about some harm they’ve done for which they haven’t been punished. Indirectly, and in different ways, they seek to punish themselves. Ramoneda said Luciana was obsessed with the thought that she’d had something to do with my daughter’s death. Hearing this, so many years later, caused me a sort of belated, bitter joy. I’d wanted her to have to think of Pauli every day of her life, and that wish had also been granted. Ramoneda said nothing more and I was sure that, whatever his suspicions, he’d keep them to himself and not do anything. After all, he had his culprit and pressure from the entire government to close the case and hush up the scandal over the convict’s escape.

“Once he’d left, though, I found myself wondering whether this wasn’t another possible explanation. A rational explanation. I considered each death again in this new light. Luciana could have put some substance in her boyfriend’s coffee: she studied biology, she’d have known what to use that would go undetected in a postmortem and she was there with him every day. And the following year, Luciana could have planted poisonous fungi in the little wood, during the same kind of lightning visit to Villa Gesell that she accused me of. Wasn’t she the one who knew all there was to know about fungi? And finally, Luciana could have written the anonymous letters. She probably knew about her brother’s relationship with that woman. But I had to dismiss this possibility before it went very far: Luciana could never have achieved the insane synchronicity between the dates of the deaths and the progress of my novel.

“Even so, considering another hypothesis, one that came, unexpectedly, from an outside source, made me regain hope that there was room for a rational explanation, even if I couldn’t come up with one. As you see, there was still something stubborn in me. I couldn’t accept, intellectually, that what had already occurred twice might occur again. So I set out to challenge him. I proceeded like a sceptic who deliberately walks under a ladder. I decided to write one more death, to test him. The scientific test of repetition. At least that was how I justified it to myself at the time, but I know there was something else. I don’t mind admitting it now: I didn’t want to stop writing the novel, even though I knew another person might die as a result. Even knowing this, I couldn’t resist. So I started devising the next death. As I said earlier, I visited several care homes and considered several ingenious variants. What I really wanted was a murder that was the opposite of his style. That was anti-thetical to all that he was. Strangely, it was you who gave me the idea, when we spoke about Luciana’s grandmother and you said that it wouldn’t count against me if she died a natural death. As soon as you’d said it, I knew that’s what it had to be. It was simple, perfect—a natural death. And to a certain extent it left me with a clean conscience. I wouldn’t be imagining and writing a murder, but a merciful release for someone who’d been bedridden for years. This afternoon I made up my mind at last to write the first draft. One death. One person.

That’s all I wanted. Do you believe this at least?” Kloster looked me straight in