The Whispering City Read Free Page A

serve as an example of how we are all equal under the law.’ The sarcastic tone was still there. ‘But I don’t think so. It seems to have been a break-in. Whatever it was, we are going to report on it. In an exclusive.’
    He paused as his eyes searched for something on his desk.
    ‘The case is in the hands of a specialist, Inspector Isidro Castro of the Criminal Investigation Brigade.’
    Isidro Castro. She didn’t know him personally, but it wouldn’t be the first time she’d written about him, although it would be the first time she did so under her own name. Castro had solved some important cases in recent years.
    She remembered one in particular: the disappearance and murder of a nurse at the San Pablo Hospital, because she had written the copy that had appeared under Carlos Belda’s byline.
    Castro had hunted one killer after another. The first was ratted out by an accomplice, who in turn accused a third man. Not a terribly long chain of betrayals, but even if it had had ten links in it, Castro would have managed to connect them all. The police used brutally effective methods, and Inspector Castro, over the years he’d been working in Barcelona, had earned a reputation as the best. Soon she would meet him. What would he look like? What would the person behind ‘the magnificent investigative work carried out by the Criminal Investigation Brigade’ – as she had written in the article – be like? It was impossible to report on crimes in Spain without using those kinds of formulas. Crimes were to be solved, and order – the country’s natural state – restored. She had done a good job. You had to do things right, even if someone else was going to get the credit for them. Perhaps Sanvisens appreciated her work, even though he had never said it, and this opportunity was her reward.
    The editor-in-chief had given up his attempt to find whatever it was with just a glance and was now rummaging through the mess of documents, newspapers and notebooks that covered his desk. Ana knew that he was searching for something for her.
    She owed a lot to Sanvisens and his friendship with her father, despite the political differences that had irrevocably distanced them. He hadn’t spoken to her father since he had been released from jail and dismissed from his post, and Sanvisens never even uttered his former colleague’s name. In fact, he grew angry if Ana even mentioned him. As for Ana, she struggled to banish the suspicion that her job at the newspaper was some sort of compensation because Sanvisens had the position that should have been her father’s. When he offered Ana her first article, she’d asked her father for ‘permission’ to accept it. He gave it to her tacitly, with the phrase, ‘We are a family of journalists.’ The name Mateo Sanvisens was still taboo.
    And now, finally, she was getting to do some serious journalism, writing about a murder case. Her surprise, and the question ‘why me?’, must have been written all over her face, because Sanvisens, as he pulled a small piece of paper out of a pile of letters, looked at her and said, ‘Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted? Well, here’s your chance. Make the most of it.’
    At the theatre or the opera, every understudy dreams of the lead losing his voice. That’s their moment, having mastered their role while watching in the wings: to step onto the stage and dazzle the audience.
    And she had got a lot of answers, but she still had one final question. ‘Will it be my own byline…?’
    Sanvisens seemed to have been expecting it.
    ‘Yes. What you write will appear under your byline.’
    He read her the note he held in his hand.
    ‘Now get moving. You have to be at police headquarters at eleven. Don’t forget your ID. Olga is doing an accreditation for you.’
    Suddenly Ana realised exactly where she had to go.
    ‘On Vía Layetana?’
    ‘Yes, that’s what I said. Is there a problem?’
    ‘No, no. I just wanted to make sure.’
    There was