The Flanders Panel (32 page)

“Have you come up with any hypotheses? Sometimes you give the impression that you’ve reached conclusions that you don’t want to tell us about.”

Munoz tilted his head a little, as he always did when confronted by a difficult question.

“It’s a bit complicated,” he replied after a brief pause. “I have a couple of ideas in my head but my problem is just what I’ve been saying. In chess you can’t prove anything until you’ve moved, and then it’s impossible to go back.”

They started walking again, between the stone benches and the blurry hedges. Julia sighed gently.

“If someone had told me that one day I’d be tracking a possible murderer with the help of a chessboard, I’d have said he was stark, staring mad.”

“I told you before that there are many links between chess and police work.” Munoz’s hand moved chess pieces in the void. “Even before Conan Doyle, there was Poe’s Dupin method.”

“Edgar Allan Poe? Don’t tell me he played chess too.”

“Oh, yes, he was a very keen player. There was an automaton known as Maelzel’s Player which almost never lost a game. Poe wrote an essay about it around 1830. To get to the bottom of the mystery he developed sixteen analytical approaches and concluded that there must be a man hidden inside the automaton.”

“And is that what you’re doing? Looking for the hidden man?”

“I’m trying to, but that doesn’t guarantee anything. I’m not Poe.”

“I hope you succeed. It would certainly be to my advantage. You’re my only hope.”

Munoz shrugged and said nothing for a while.

“I don’t want you to get your hopes up,” he said after they’d walked on a little further. “When I began playing chess, there were times when I felt sure I couldn’t lose a single game. Then, in the midst of my euphoria, I was beaten, and that failure set my feet firmly back on the ground.” He screwed up his eyes as if he could make out someone ahead of them in the fog. “There’s always someone better than you. That’s why it’s useful to keep yourself in a state of healthy uncertainty.”

“I find it terrible, that uncertainty.”

“You have reason to. However fraught a game becomes, each player knows that it’s a bloodless battle. After all, he consoles himself, it is only a game… But that’s not so in your case.”

“And you? Do you think he knows about your role in this?”

Munoz looked evasive again.

“I don’t know if he knows who I am. But he must know that there’s someone capable of interpreting his moves. Otherwise, the game would make no sense.”

“I think we should pay Lola Belmonte a visit.”

“I agree.”

Julia looked at her watch.

“Since we’re near my place, why don’t you come up for coffee? Menchu’s staying with me, and she should be awake by now. She has a few problems.”

“Serious problems?”

“So it seems, and last night she was behaving very strangely. I’d like you to meet her… Especially now.”

They crossed the avenue, dazzled by car headlights.

“If I find out that Lola Belmonte is behind this whole thing,” Julia said unexpectedly, “I’ll kill her with my bare hands.”

Munoz looked at her, surprised.

“Assuming that my theory of aggression is correct,” he said, and she saw that he was observing her with new respect, “you’d make an excellent player if you ever decided to take up chess.”

“I already have taken it up,” Julia replied, peering rancorously at the shadows drifting by her in the fog. “I’ve been playing for some time now, and I don’t enjoy it one bit.”

She put her key in the security lock and turned it twice. Munoz was waiting by her side on the landing. He’d taken off his raincoat and folded it over his arm.

“It’ll be a mess,” she said. “I didn’t have time to tidy up this morning.”

“Don’t worry. It’s the coffee that matters.”

Julia went into the studio and raised the large ceiling blind. The foggy brightness from outside slipped into the room, dusting the air with a grey light that left the farthest corners of the room in shadow.

“Still too dark,” she said and was about to switch on the light when she saw the look on Munoz’s face. With a sudden feeling of panic, she followed the direction of his gaze.

“Where have you put the painting?” he asked.

Julia didn’t reply. She felt as though something had burst inside her, deep inside, and she stood utterly still, her eyes wide, staring at the empty easel.

“Menchu,” she murmured finally, feeling as if everything were spinning about her. “She warned me about this last night, only I couldn’t see it.”

Her stomach contracted and she felt the bitter taste of bile in her mouth. Absurdly, she glanced at Munoz and then ran towards the bathroom, but, feeling faint, stopped and leaned against the doorway of her bedroom. That was when she saw Menchu. She was lying on her back on the floor at the foot of the bed. The scarf that had been used to strangle her was still around her neck. Her skirt was pulled grotesquely up to her waist, and the neck of a bottle had been thrust into her vagina.

Queen, Knight, Bishop

I’m not playing with lifeless black and white pawns. I’m playing with flesh-and-blood human beings.
E. Lasker

The judge didn’t order the body to be taken away until seven o’clock, by which time it was dark. All afternoon the house had been filled with the comings and goings of policemen and court officials, with flashlights flickering in the hallway and in the bedroom. At last, they carried Menchu out on a stretcher, zipped up inside a white plastic cover, and all that remained of her was the silhouette drawn in chalk on the floor by the indifferent hand a policeman, the one who’d been driving the blue Ford when Julia drew her pistol on him in the Rastro.

Inspector Feijoo was the last to leave; he’d stayed on for nearly an hour to complete the statements made earlier by Julia and Munoz, and also by Cesar, who had come as soon as he heard the news. The policeman, who’d never been near a chessboard in his life, was patently bewildered. He kept looking at Munoz as if at some bizarre animal, but nodded with wary gravity at the latter’s technical explanations, every now and then turning to Cesar and Julia as though wondering whether this were just some huge practical joke concocted by the three of them. Occasionally, he jotted down notes, tugged at his tie and gave another uncomprehending glance at the typewritten characters on the card found by Menchu’s body. Munoz’s interpretation of the symbols had merely succeeded in giving Feijoo a splitting headache. What really interested him, apart from the oddness of the whole situation, were details about the quarrel Menchu and her boyfriend had had the previous evening-This was because - as policemen sent to investigate had reported back during the‘ afternoon - Maximo Olmedilla Sanchez, twenty-eight years old, single and a male model by profession, was nowhere to be found. Furthermore, two witnesses, a taxi driver and the porter in the building opposite, had seen a young man answering his description leaving Julia’s building between twelve and twelve-fifteen that day. According to the pathologist’s first report, Menchu Roch had been strangled, from the front, having first been dealt a mortal blow to the throat, between eleven and twelve. The detail of the bottle in the vagina — a large bottle of Beefeater gin, almost full - to which Feijoo made repeated and extremely crude reference (revenge for all that chess nonsense his three interviewees had thrown at him), he interpreted as concrete evidence, in the sense that everything pointed to a crime of passion. After all, the murdered woman - he’d frowned and put on a suitably grave face, making it clear that people generally get what they deserve - was, as both Julia and Cesar had just explained, not a person of irreproachable sexual morality. As to how this murder was linked to the death of Professor Ortega, the connection was obvious, given the disappearance of the painting. He ventured a few more explanations, listened attentively to the replies that Julia, Munoz and Cesar gave to his further questions, and finally said good-bye, after arranging to see them at the police station the following morning.

“As for you, Senorita, you’ve nothing more to worry about.” He paused on the threshold, with the dignified expression of a public official fully in charge of the situation. “We know who we’re looking for now. Good night.”

When she’d closed the door, Julia leaned back against it and looked at her two friends. She had dark shadows under her now dry eyes. She’d cried a lot, out of grief and rage, tormented by her own impotence. Immediately after finding Menchu’s body she’d wept, quietly in front of Munoz, then, when Cesar had arrived, looking pale and harassed, with the horror of the news evident on his face, she’d embraced him as she had when she was a child, her tears had become sobs, and she’d lost all control, clinging to Cesar, who could only murmur futile words of consolation. It wasn’t just her friend’s death; it was, she said, her voice breaking as hot tears streamed down her face, the unbearable tension of the last few days, the humiliating certainty that the murderer was playing with their lives with absolute impunity, confident that he had them at his mercy.

At least the police interrogation had had one positive effect: it had restored her to a sense of reality. The stubborn stupidity with which Feijoo refused to see the obvious, the false affability with which he’d accepted — without understanding anything, without making the slightest attempt to understand - the detailed explanations they’d given him about what was going on, had reinforced her belief that she had nothing to hope for from that direction. The phone call from the officer dispatched to Max’s and the discovery of the two witnesses had confirmed Feijoo in his idea, typical of the police, that the simplest motive is usually the most likely. The chess story was, of course, interesting, something that would doubtless fill out the details of the incident. But as far as the substance of the matter went, it was purely anecdotal. The detail of the bottle proved it. Pure criminal pathology. “Because, despite what you read in detective novels, Senorita, appearances are never deceptive.”

“There’s no doubt about it now,” said Julia as the Inspector could be heard going down the stairs. “Alvaro was murdered, like Menchu. Someone’s obviously been after the painting for a long time.”

Munoz, standing by the table, was looking at the piece of paper on which, the moment Feijoo had left, he’d noted down the contents of the card found by the body. Cesar was sitting on the sofa where Menchu had spent the night, staring in stupefaction at the empty easel. When he heard Julia speak, he shook his head.

“It wasn’t Max who did it,” he said. “There is absolutely no way an imbecile like him could have thought all this up.”

“But he was here. At least in the building.”

Cesar bowed before the evidence, but without much conviction.

“There must be someone else involved. If Max was, so to speak, the hired help, someone else was pulling the strings.” He slowly raised one hand and tapped his forehead with his index finger. “Someone with brains.”

“The mystery player. And now he’s won the game.”

“He hasn’t won it yet,” said Munoz, and they turned towards him in surprise.

“He’s got the painting,” Julia pointed out. “If that isn’t winning . . ”

There was a gleam of absorbed fascination in Munoz’s eyes; their dark pupils seemed to see, beyond the four walls of the room, the mathematical meeting in space of complex combinations.

“With or without the painting, the game goes on,” he said, and showed them the paper:

“This time,” he added, “the murderer doesn’t suggest one move, but three.” He went over to his raincoat and took out his pocket chess set. “The first is obvious: Q x R, the black queen takes the white rook. The taking of the white rook represents Menchu Roch’s murder, just as, in this game, the white knight symbolised your friend Alvaro and, in the painting, Roger de Arras.” Munoz arranged the pieces on the board as he talked. “Therefore, so far in this game, the black queen has taken only two pieces. And in reality,” he glanced at Cesar and Julia, who’d gathered round to study the board, “each of those two pieces represents a murder. Our opponent identifies himself with the black queen; when another black piece takes a white piece, as happened two moves back when we lost the first white rook, nothing happened. At least, not as far as we know.”