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The headlines for the 5th April 2012:
‘Three young men found dead in strange circumstances. Javier Fernández Martínez, Sebastián Covelo García and Marcos Dorribo Vázquez have appeared dead over the course of Holy Week after receiving, in each case, the mysterious visit from a young, dark-haired woman of average height.’ La Región.
‘A black Easter week in Ourense. A murder on Monday night, and what seemed at first to be two tragic accidents on Tuesday and Wednesday, bring to light the presence of a serial killer in the city.’ La Voz de Galicia, Ourense edition.
‘A supposed serial killer spreads terror throughout in the city. A golf ball discovered by each of the victims; her macabre symbol.’ El Faro de Ourense.
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Antón had left the office in search of coffee almost half an hour ago, whilst Eva cast her eye once more over the day’s press. Two black coffees, extracted from the ancient machine situated in the station’s foyer. One euro twenty, in coins, and barely a minute in production. Inevitably, Antón must have been stopped along the way, she deduced. It wasn’t that she was bothered by her partner’s absence, but rather that she was now beginning to realise that the coffee would be arriving cold.
When he finally arrived, Eva took it with humour:
“Antón, was the machine broken?”
“What machine?” he asked, while he placed the plastic cup on top of the table.
“The coffee machine...”
“No. Why do you ask?”
Eva responded with an expression of absolute innocence. Antón understood, and went to his seat, explaining as he stirred his coffee:
“I was in the foyer watching how the new scanner works.”
“And is it working well...?” Undoubtedly a potent reason for dragging your feet, Eva thought sarcastically.
“Yes, I think so. A parcel’s just arrived for Miguel, and it’s incredible: you put it on the tray, pass it through the scanner from above, and the image immediately comes up, like an x-ray. If it had any metal inside, it’d come up on the screen.”
“Well, if it’s for Miguel you can all put it away in a safe place, because until Monday, he won’t be here to collect it.”
Eva looked down, bringing an end to the conversation, and picked up the newspapers. Only a second later, she looked back up again suddenly:
“A parcel for Miguel?”
“Yes. It was brought in by a courier.”
“What kind of parcel?”
Antón left his coffee on the table and stood up:
“A box,” he said, sensing that something was not quite right. “A small box,” he corrected himself. “Little...” he indicated the size with his hands as he spoke, and it really did seem to be a very small box.
Eva walked out and set off in the direction of the officers’ office, to Miguel’s desk, with Antón behind her. There it was: it was a small, light box. Eva shook it in the air, and ascertained that something was moving around inside. She removed the paper it was wrapped in and opened it. Inside was another box. She did the same thing again and discovered yet another box, smaller than the previous. She opened it quickly, and was finally able to confirm her worst fears: inside was a golf ball.
“Call Miguel,” she said immediately.
Antón did not realise that Eva was already offering him her phone. He ran to take her mobile, and then ran to the foyer. There he asked the officer for Miguel’s number, who immediately consulted an extensive list. He did not take long to find it. Antón punched in the nine digits and waited for the dial tone. Eva came past him, shouting:
“Let’s go. Now!”
Antón followed her with the phone to his ear. Two patrol cars also followed. The sirens sounded in unison. The convoy easily parted the way through the festive Ourense morning.
“There’s no answer,” said Antón, after dialling the number for the third time.
“Shit,” Eva let slip, with obvious nerves. “Keep trying.”
There was no need. Barely a few seconds later, the three cars parked in front of Number 70 on the street Vasco Díaz Tanco. Several neighbours came out, alerted by all the noise. One aging woman was cleaning the main doorway, with the door open. On seeing the cars, she moved aside, startled.
Eva was the first to climb the steps, with the rest of the police officers struggling to keep up with her. When she arrived at the door to the second flat, she banged on it several times. Then she rang the bell. Next, and without waiting for a response, she banged on the door again with the palm of her hand.
Everybody listened. Nobody answered.
“It smells of gunpowder,” noted Antón.
The six police officers breathed in, including the woman who had been cleaning the main doorway.
The heaviest policeman administered an accurate kick at the latch, and the door gave way, opening before them. They all drew out their handguns.
Eva entered the hall and looked to her right: the kitchen. Then she looked to her left. She went in to the living room, and was immediately stopped in her tracks, faced with the sight of Miguel’s body. He was in front of the sofa, sprawled over the small coffee table, in a large pool of blood. She quickly approached him and, bending down, she took his pulse. Nothing.
She stood back up, slowly.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she repeated as she walked out of the room.
In the hallway, she punched the wall. Then she leaned against it, firstly one shoulder, and then her head. Antón walked up to her. Eva did not move.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
“I knew it, I just knew it,” she murmured.
“No, you couldn’t have known.”
“He’s still warm...”
Antón did not answer. Eva remained silent for a moment. Then she turned around and looked straight at her partner, visibly vulnerable:
“Could you cover the scene? I need to be alone for a moment.”
“Yes, don’t worry about it.”
“Although I’m sure that she hasn’t left us with anything to go on,” she reasoned. “If you need me, I’ll be downstairs,” she then added.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it myself, really.”
Eva descended the stairs despondently, staring at the floor, thoughtful.
“Has something happened to Miguel?” asked the woman who was cleaning, as Eva drew level with her.
The inspector looked at her, and nodded. Then she asked:
“Have you seen a young woman enter or leave?”
“No.”
There were no further questions.
––––––––
Eva moved away from the house, went around the corner and took a seat on the terrace of one of the small bars in the area. She was the only customer there at that time. All the others, alerted by the sirens, had gone out to see what was happening.
Sitting with a large cup of coffee, and with her red hair covering a large portion of her face, nobody suspected that the woman was in the police force. That was exactly what she was aiming for. There, she would be able to think in peace, and organise her thoughts, with the exception of the huge commotion on the next street. She looked at the sign: ‘Café Ultreia”, the Galician equivalent of ‘Keep Going’. The perfect place, she thought.
Antón had not asked her where she would be waiting for him, but he knew her well enough to know how to find her. He arrived just over an hour later, holding up a transparent airtight bag, the kind in which they keep evidence for examination, and inside it was a small bottle. It was tube shaped, and originally must have contained perfume or, failing that, some sort of cooking spice.
“Poison,” he said, nearing Eva’s table. She was not perturbed. “From what can be seen, she’d planned on poisoning him but, for whatever reason, she had access to the handgun, and didn’t pass up the opportunity,” he explained as he sat down. “I’ve also checked his mobile. He had received your call and, shortly before, one from a phone box. There were holiday brochures on the table and two cups of coffee. My guess would be that Emma found out that he was planning on going away on holiday and she called him with the excuse of changing or finalising some detail about the trip.”
He then left the bottle on the table and continued:
“I’ll bet it’s Tetrodotoxin,” he said, “but we’ll have to analyse it to be sure.”
“Tetrodotoxin?” Antón’s interest in the most diverse poisons was famous down at the station.
“Yes. It’s the venom from the puffer fish; you know, from the Japanese dish ‘fugu’,” he explained. “You’re conscious the whole time as it paralyses your muscles. Death is caused by asphyxiation after only a few hours. A tough end, as much physically as psychologically, because there’s no antidote for it, and what usually happens is that you are aware the whole time that you’re dying.”
Eva smiled, not without a certain amount of sarcasm, as a waiter, alerted by Antón’s presence, came up to the table:
“Can I get you anything?” he asked.
“Yes, a black coffee please.”
As soon as the man left, Antón turned back to Eva, but this time with a more personal tone:
“How are you?” he asked, looking her in the eye.
“I’m okay,” she answered slowly. “I knew he was lying to us, but I never imagined that he was also in Emma’s sights. I suppose I didn’t get to work it out because, amongst other things, he himself didn’t want me to.”
“Do you feel up to carrying on?”
“Of course,” answered Eva, reaffirming the statement with a smile. “More than ever, I assure you. If I abandon it now, she’ll have won. And don’t get me wrong, I can concede defeat for one battle, but not for the war,” she declared.
Then she tied up her hair and added:
“I just needed a moment to get my head together. I’ve hardly slept at all the last few days, and I suppose it’s beginning to show. But I’m ready now.”
The conversation paused when the waiter left Antón’s coffee on the table, next to the receipt. Antón picked it up, took two coins out of his wallet, and gave it to the man.
“Keep the change,” he told him.
“Thank you.”
Alone once more, he resumed with the details of the case:
“The weird thing is that she killed him with his own regulatory weapon, and then left it on the kitchen table next to the poison. That’s what’s strange, even more so when I had a hunch, and it occurred to me to look for his badge, thinking that I would find that as well. But I didn’t find it.”
Eva sat up in the seat:
“His badge isn’t in his flat?”
“No,” he answered, shaking his head. “I looked for it in the living room, the bedroom, and in the kitchen, but there was nothing. Bearing in mind that he lived alone, I don’t think that he’d leave the handgun in plain sight and yet put his badge away in some secret hiding place.
“We need to have a good search for it to be sure. For a moment, I’d thought that Miguel could be the final victim. It made sense,” she reasoned. “But if she has taken his badge, that’s surely because she’s planning to keep killing, and needs it to gain access to the next victim.”
Antón was now talking on the radio to the patrol officers who were still in Miguel’s apartment. The order was clear to all: search for the badge right down to behind the last cushion. Then he turned his attention to Eva:
“And you don’t think she could be showing off? I mean, she shoots him dead, but leaves the gun at the crime scene along with an unused bottle of poison, before sending to our station her personal mark, so that we find the body. The badge could simply be a trophy.”
“No, for that, she would needed a certain extra level of nerve, and if that were the case, she would have done it before.”
“Maybe the news coming out in the press has inflated her ego?”
“No. For a man yes, but not for a woman. If something drives a woman to draw up a plan as meticulous as this: impersonating people, and studying her victims in detail, then she wouldn’t just abandon it because everything was going well. When it comes to things like this, we’re more cerebral.”
Eva paused her explanation, leaned back again in her chair, and stared blankly at the pavement, searching for inspiration. Then she continued:
“Emma is cold and methodical, and will continue to be: that, I’m sure of. It’s the only way she could carry out four almost perfect murders in four days, without us having a decent opportunity to catch her. She’s thrashing us. But in practice, however, not only has she studied to the letter the way she was going to kill, but she’s also born in mind how to deal with the victims’ reactions, and ours, in order to be able to keep doing it. And we hadn’t taken that into account until now.”
Antón didn’t really understand what his partner meant, but before he could ask her to clarify, she anticipated the question:
“In other words, I suspect that she has organised the victims in such a way that when killing one she is, in turn, procuring the opportunity to access the second, and it goes along like that. Have you finished in Miguel’s’ flat?” she asked, standing up.
“Yes. All that needs doing now is taking a written statement from the neighbours,” he answered as he finished off the last drop of his coffee, “but I’ve told the officers to take charge of them because everyone’s already told us that nobody saw anything.”
“Well then, let’s go to the station. I need to make some calls to confirm some details. You can leave me there, and in the meantime take the opportunity to pay a visit to the Guardia Civil, to see if they can hurry up with that report.”
“Perfect.”
Antón also stood up.
“Miguel is the key lead,” Eva stressed, now on the way back to the car. “He could just be seen as simply her next victim, but in reality he isn’t. I suspect that for Emma he was the most complicated to include in her plan but, for us, this is the one that tells us how to interpret the information we have.”
The two of them got into Eva’s C4 and set off back to the station, without stopping by Miguel’s flat. It wasn’t imperative, and they could not afford to waste any time. There was a lot of work ahead of them.
––––––––
At the first hour of the afternoon, Eva was still in her office. She had been holed up in there for three hours, making telephone calls, jotting down dates, drawing up charts. Many times she would stare blankly and indefinitely at the wall, before beginning to write compulsively on a sheet of paper which, a short while later, she would throw in the bin, to start from scratch on another. As a result, the bin was almost full, her head on the verge of explosion, and the telephone on top of her table was now being used for the last time.
“Mr Álvarez, I’ve finally found you. I’m Inspector Santiago, and I’m in charge of investigating Sebas’ murder.”
“Yes, I remember you. Tell me, have there been any developments?”
“At the moment, no. We’re still investigating, which is why I wish to ask you something relating to the case.”
“I’m listening.”
“If I remember correctly, when I arrived at the factory on Tuesday, you were in the entryway with your two other colleagues, and a policeman was asking you insistently about the physical appearance of the woman who had visited Sebas that morning.”
“I remember, but the fact is that none of us had looked at her enough to be able to give a very detailed description.”
“No, I’m not calling about that. Now try to remember, because this is important. Was this policeman trying to get you to say how she looked, or was he wanting you to confirm an appearance that he already knew?”
The man thought for a minute on the other end of the line. Then, he answered doubtfully:
“Well, to tell you the truth, now that you ask I don’t think he had the slightest idea how she looked until we told him.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Thank you very much, and we’ll keep you informed of any progress.”
Eva noted down on one of the sheets of paper in front of her, and a hint of a smile appeared on her lips. It was sly, and the kind of smile that materialises unconsciously when we believe we’ve discovered some piece of information available only to a very small number of people. Then she looked at her watch. In his last call, Antón had announced to her that he would be no longer than half an hour in arriving, and that time was almost up. She got up and walked to the coffee machine in the foyer, with the papers in her hand. There she took her coffee and went outside to drink it, where a timid sun was trying to warm the cold Ourense Maundy Thursday.
She had barely begun to stir her coffee when Antón arrived:
“What did the Guardia Civil tell you?” asked Eva as soon as she saw him.
“Not much. They’ve asked me for one more day. They can’t find the report on Emma’s accident because, as we don’t have the exact place or date, they can’t know which detachment covered it, as that stretch is covered by several of them.”
“Well, whatever. Let’s go inside and see if the superintendent’s free, and we can relay the situation to him. He’s been wanting to speak with us all afternoon.”
They walked to the back of the corridor and knocked on Míguez’s door. Behind them, the entire station was like a funeral parlour. From inside the office, the chief’s unmistakable voice answered:
“Come in.”
First Eva walked in, followed by Antón, and they sat down simultaneously at the two chairs in front of the desk, under Míguez’s attentive gaze. The superintendent remained silent. A silence that, as soon as they were settled in their seats, he broke without any sense of compassion, with a look in his eyes that would freeze the blood of even the most composed mortal:
“I hope you have something, and something good. That woman has killed one of our own.”
He took a breath, and then reasserted:
“One of our own, and right under our noses too. I want her now, dead or alive. Eva, from this moment, you will have all of the officers at your disposal, to do with whatever you need to. But I want to see what woman locked in a cell ASAP,” his tone rose with each word, “and if needs be I will go out after her in the street myself. But nobody, and I mean nobody kills one of my men and then goes home to sleep soundly in their bed, understood?”
The two officers both nodded in unison. Then he continued, although now somewhat calmer:
“Tell me that you’ve found something relevant...”
Eva took the lead:
“Sir, Miguel’s death affects us all, and we are completely sensitive to the situation,” the superintendent continued to wait expectantly. “Regarding the case, I think that we should keep a cool head, and if we do, we’ll see that this latest murder reveals a lot of interesting information. Miguel is a key victim, because he’s the only one that we knew both dead and alive.”
“You have my attention.”
“I think that we’re now ready to pinpoint the murderer’s modus operandi and, in turn, part of the motivation that drives her to do it. It’s possible that we may be mistaken somewhere along the line, but that’s a risk we have to take. If we want to catch her, we need to sketch out some conclusions now. Otherwise, she’ll escape before we can even get close.”
Eva took a moment to look through the papers she had brought from her office and which, up until that point, she had kept on her lap.
“We know that Emma’s the murderer, and we think that, surely for reasons of revenge, she has spent years designing a plan with the aim of killing seven particular men during Holy Week; all of them in Ourense, and one a day. In that sense, I interpret the fact that she’s sent the golf ball to mean simply that Miguel is the victim for Thursday. There’s no other meaning. Just think that if she hadn’t sent it to us, he wouldn’t have been discovered until Monday or Tuesday. And I say seven men because by Monday she will have already carried out her plan, given that Miguel was thinking about returning to the city on that day.”
The chief listened attentively to his inspector’s reasoning without trying to interrupt her.
“So anyway, in this plan,” she continued, “Emma has organised the victims, and planned out how she was going to kill them in such a way that not only is she able to access them but also so that she can continue killing the rest. As such, Javi was the first. She killed him by surprise on Monday. He had to be the first one because every Monday at the start of the holidays he would go to Lugo. Besides, she needed to keep him there until the dawn, because that way she could kill Sebas, the second victim, the following morning whilst avoiding him finding out somehow that she was there. Miguel still didn’t know, and even if it came out in the press, because it happened at dawn it wouldn’t be published until Wednesday. For that reason, and also because he could have been warned by Miguel, she felt out the situation with Marc in the café. Disguised as a student, she checked out whether he suspected anything. If indeed he did suspect, she was carrying around the poison as a plan B, but in the likely eventuality that he wouldn’t recognise her, she would use plan A, which was ideal for her and consisted of an accident when he got back to his car at mid-morning. Because he thought that the supposed student was amusing to him, and he hadn’t been forewarned, she had a clear path. The poison, on the other hand, really was plan A with Miguel who, as a policeman, was in the know. Yet once she was in his flat, Emma attacked when she saw the handgun. For that to be the case, she needed for us not to know that Miguel was a possible victim, so that we couldn’t monitor him. Therefore she was careful to disguise Javi’s murder as a crime of passion, and the second and third murders as accidents.”
She now turned to Antón:
“You told me, when we found Miguel’s body, that I couldn’t have known. If you think about it, I couldn’t have known because she’d got us believing that for her plan to work, the victims mustn’t know they were in danger. How could we have imagined that he was one of them?”
Antón nodded. Eva proceeded:
“My deduction is that after committing a crime, she immediately starts focussing on the next one. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have been able to find out about Miguel’s holiday. I managed to speak with the sales assistant at the agency, and Emma was there just a few minutes after him. But be careful, because I don’t think that she would have brought Miguel forward in her plan just because he wanted to leave. I think it’s more the case that he was always the fourth victim, because she needs his badge in order to access the fifth victim, who I fear will be killed tomorrow.”
“Who’s the fifth?” asked Míguez, afraid of the answer he was about to hear.
“Unfortunately, we don’t know yet. But then again, we do now have more information than we did before, and the search and protection of the three future victims will be the only line of investigation we’ll follow from this moment on. At least we now know that it’s not the entire city that’s in danger.”
“If the victims were chosen at random,” noted Antón, “she would never have gone for a policeman who, on top of that, was not even investigating the case.”
“Are you both sure you want to discard the possibility that she could be a serial killer that’s just turned up and is choosing her victims at random?” the chief wanted to assure.
“Yes, her attacks are too elaborate,” Eva answered. “She’s not a serial killer, but one who kills for a specific reason. Surely, it’s for vengeance.”
“Yes, I think so too,” said Míguez, backing her up.
“Besides,” she added, “even if we have any doubts, we don’t have the sufficient time or staff to cover two lines of investigation. And, if we had to choose one, it’s clear which one it should be.”
Míguez took that point as the end of that topic, and moved directly on to the next:
“What information do you have about the identity of the next victims?”
“First and foremost,” Eva answered, “it must be said that if our predictions are correct, we need to think in terms of the fifth victim facilitating access to the sixth, and the sixth to the seventh. That being so, theoretically these future victims need to be informed of what’s coming their way. Furthermore, I would venture to say that the fact that she always leaves a golf ball has the aim of terrorising them. If they hadn’t warned Miguel, he would have found out through the press. And, importantly, she left the handgun and the poison in Miguel’s home because she doesn’t need them in her plan and, in turn, could make us believe that she’s all finished. It could be that she wants to make sure that they don’t try to leave like Miguel. In my opinion, we should publicise the latest murder in the press.”
“I agree,” Míguez interrupted with much gravity. “At the end of the day, it’s not like it’s possible for there to be any more pressure on us than there already is right now. And if we can save somebody’s life with it, then it’s worthwhile.”
“Regarding the victims’ identity,” Eva resumed, as she changed to another sheet of paper, “I’m sure that they all knew each other, even though they didn’t currently maintain contact in the majority of cases. What links them together, and what are they doing on Emma’s list? Well at the moment, we don’t know exactly, but it is something highly embarrassing, or even criminal, that happened about six or seven years ago, and in Ourense. I say embarrassing or criminal because, if it wasn’t, Miguel would not have hidden whilst knowing that his life was in danger, nor would the rest of them have concealed it from the people around them, like Sebas did from his wife. It must have happened in Ourense, as Miguel and Sebas never left here, and the others did not leave often. They certainly never went together. And finally, it must have happened five, six or seven years ago, because that is the time frame in which Javi came to Ourense to study, and Emma suffered her accident and her face was changed. This last detail, combined with the fact that years had passed by, would explain why none of them physically recognised her. That accident that happened in Ourense six or seven years ago, and also during Holy Week, could be the starting point of it all, but we haven’t managed to get hold of the report. They’ve told us that it was a normal accident, but we’re waiting to be able to make sure of that.”
“And how is it you don’t have the report yet?” asked Míguez.
“The date and place are not exact,” clarified Antón. “I’ve just come from meeting with the Guardia Civil and they maintain that they’re looking intensively for it in the archives, but that time period is not on a computer database, and so it’s a slow process. Anyway, they’ve guaranteed that we’ll have it tomorrow.”
“But in any case, I doubt the accident was the cause,” noted Eva, “and I’ll explain why. After thinking about it, what fits the most for me is that the other car crossed paths with them and propelled them off the road. But only five people will fit in a car, not seven, and also if it had been that way, Emma would not have been able to see the number plate to track them down with such precision. And furthermore, my deduction is that there was no paint transferred onto the vehicle, nor tyre marks on the road, because if there had been, then they wouldn’t have archived the accident as a car veering off the road with no apparent cause.”
Eva put the papers away before continuing:
“No, I’ve gone over it many times in my head and, in my opinion, it was something that happened at that time, it could even have happened that night, but not specifically the accident. It’s possible that they are related, but I don’t think that that’s the direct cause. And that’s assuming that Emma and her family made that journey often during those years, in which it’s also possible that it wasn’t specifically that night either,” she concluded.
“Let me know when the report arrives,” Míguez said, taking the hypothesis as settled. “Tell me, how are you going to continue with the investigation?”
“At the moment, we’re going to locate all of the contacts on Miguel’s phone. I’ve been checking the lists from the mobiles belonging to the victims, and Miguel is in Marc’s, and vice versa. That, we do know. But we’re making one mistake: until now, when one died, we checked if the previous victims were on their phone, but not if the more recent ones were on the contacts list of the first ones. I’ve checked today and there is indeed one: Miguel is on Javi’s phone who, by the way, has an enormous contacts list.
“Do you think that the future victims could be on one of the mobiles?”
“I think that we should check all of Miguel’s calls over the last few days; it could be that he’s warned somebody else like he wanted to do with Marc. In case there’s no luck there, we’ll search for all of the twenty-something men in Ourense who were friends with them from seven or eight years ago. Bear in mind that Javi’s parents were not aware of their son’s friends here, and that Sebas and Miguel were orphans. Marc’s parents don’t know his friends by name and even less those he had back then. Only Miguel had a brother, and he’s coming in this afternoon. We’ll question him too and, also, we can’t discard the possibility that he’s also in Emma’s sights. We have no other option than to look on our own trying to think ahead.”
“I wish you luck.”
The two police officers left Míguez’s office in silence, and with their heads down. In the corridor, they shared out the tasks between them. Antón wanted to go and receive Miguel’s brother and give him his condolences. A thankless task. Eva would make phone calls. The rest of the officers, with Emma’s photograph in hand, would search and identify any woman in the street who looked like her.
As soon as everybody got moving, Eva returned to shutting herself up in her office. She picked up Miguel’s phone and looked at the calls made over the last two days: only Marc.
“Damn!” she exclaimed.
She left the phone on the table. She let her hair down, and unhurriedly smoothed it, and then put it back up again with a hairband. She checked the phone again and dialled the first male contact that appeared on the list: Abel.
“Hello?” came a harsh voice from the other end of the line.
“Hello, I would like to speak with Abel.”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“I work with the police. Do you know a young man called Miguel? Dark complexion, twenty-seven years old, and works on our force?”
Abel did not even take a second before he answered:
“Well no, not off the top of my head.”
“The number I’m calling on is on his contacts list,” Eva said, hoping he might shed some light as to why.
“Well I’m not saying it isn’t, but you’re calling a garage, and this is the garage mobile. I suppose then he’ll be a client. If you can tell me what type of car he has, or better still, if you can give me the number plate, I can look it up on the computer and I’m sure I’ll be able to identify it. But I don’t know who he is by name, just like I don’t ask my clients what they do either.”
“Don’t worry, that won’t be necessary.”
“It’s no trouble. Or if you’d prefer to come around, we’re open until nine, even if the door is closed.”
“No, don’t worry about it, I thought you were somebody else. Thank you for your collaboration.”
As soon as she hung up, Eva picked up the mobile and ran down the contacts list. She did not get to the end. Then she looked at the other three phones. Next, she looked at the clock. It was half past five in the afternoon. She heaved a sigh.
She wouldn’t be able to call anybody after twelve o’clock at night, she thought.