Water-Blue Eyes Read Free Page A

appreciation of the landscape as an artist would.
    Estévez took three agile leaps down the stairs and placed himself behind the inspector. Barcia handed a pair of latex gloves to each of them.
    ‘Where’s the corpse?’ asked Caldas.
    ‘In here, on the bed,’ Barcia replied, opening the door to the only bedroom in the flat.
    Rafael Estévez, struggling to ease his huge hands into the gloves, opened his mouth for the first time since he’d come in.
    ‘Fucking hell!’

Find
    The man’s horror-stricken face was a clear indication of the pain he had gone through. His hands were tied to the headboard of the bed with a piece of white cloth, and his naked body was contorted into an unnatural posture. A sheet covered him from the waist down to his feet.
    Leo Caldas frowned in a reflex action, shutting his nostrils to keep at bay the foetid waft of decaying flesh. His face relaxed a moment later, as he realised the corpse was too recent to give off the smell of death.
    Guzmán Barrio, the forensic doctor examining the corpse, turned round when he heard them walk into the room.
    ‘I had to start without you, Leo,’ he said, looking at a watch one could barely make out through his glove.
    ‘I’m sorry, Guzmán. They kept me at the station until the last possible moment. Do you know Rafael Estévez?’ asked Caldas, turning towards his subordinate.
    ‘We’ve seen each other at the station,’ the doctor confirmed.
    ‘How’s the examination going?’ asked Estévez.
    ‘Oh, it’s going.’
    ‘I see,’ said Estévez. Then he added to himself. ‘Why is everyone always so precise round here?’
    Leo Caldas approached the bed and inspected the dead man’s hands, tightly tied to the headboard. They were big but delicate, and due to the lack of blood they’d taken on a bluish shade that contrasted with his pale arms. From the deep marks round his wrists it could be deduced that he had struggled to free himself until pretty much his last breath.
    ‘Do we know who he is?’ he asked.
    It was Clara Barcia who answered.
    ‘Luis Reigosa, thirty-four years old. A native of Breu. He was a professional musician, a saxophonist. Concerts, lessons, and so on … He lived alone, and had been renting this flat for a couple of years.’
    Caldas experienced a familiar unease as he heard the concise biographical details about the man.

    Until he joined the police force, the only dead body Leo Caldas had seen from up close was that of his mother lying in her coffin. He hadn’t even asked to see her, but had agreed to it when someone mentioned it was the last chance to say goodbye. Suddenly he was lifted off the ground, and he found himself in someone’s arms, as if levitating, peering over that dark wooden box in which the inert body of his mother lay wrapped in a shroud. In a state of confusion, he had looked at a face seemingly covered with a strange coat of wax, and in those brief seconds that he remembered as lasting an eternity, a few of his tears had splattered on the glass sealing the coffin. His mother’s sunken eyes were closed, and her pale lips were barely distinguishable from the rest of her face, a colour that was in sharp contrast to the lipstick she had applied even until her last days.
    For years that indelible waxen image had visited his dreams. And he had often remembered his father at the wake, sitting in a corner, his face transfigured with pain yet not shedding one tear.
    At the police academy some time later, when he was still a recruit, he’d often been warned he was bound to find himself faced with a violent death. Caldas had felt scared and expectant of that future personal encounter, as well as uncertain of what his reaction might be.
    He had soon found out, on one of his first nights on duty, when he and his partner were called to a park where a homeless man had been stabbed to death. Not without surprise, he discovered that seeing the unknown man’s body didn’t shock him at all. He didn’t even