[This 2019 crime novel is written in two parts. I am reading it in four sections, so each part is divided into two in this running commentary. I write about what I’ve read before reading further, so I never know where it’s heading. Spoiler alert: As you read this, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
20 September 2023
Part 1, Chapters 1-3 (of five)
It’s always slightly disorientating to read European novels in translation. It’s easy enough to write that we’re getting the point of view of a Spanish police detective in his late twenties: ‘Melchor is still in his office […] waiting for the night shift to end….’ Suddenly he gets a call that there has been a brutal double murder. An old but very powerful local business owner and his wife have been tortured and killed at home, and the narrator doesn’t spare any of the horrific details once Melchor arrives at the scene.
But this is Catalonia, and I’ll have to live with the knowledge that I’m not going to catch the nuances of the politics and economics of the local territory. Terra Alta is a thinly populated, somewhat overlooked region, and the factory and related businesses owned by the murdered couple provide hundreds of jobs in the small town of Gandesa. They were very religious, although there has already been a suggestion that the old man’s high-profile Catholicism might have been something of a sham. The local copper says they were well-liked for the opportunities they provided. But, again, things might not be so straightforward. The detective’s wife, born locally, knows plenty of people who regarded the old man as a despot who paid his workers as little as possible. The first question posed by the inspector in charge of the case is, did he have enemies?
Cercas, a famous and respected writer in Spain, has gone for the format of a meticulously described police procedural. It isn’t only the investigation that is presented this way—although it is, to match the systematic methodology of the deputy inspector brought in from Tortosa, the nearest city in the region. Every character, as Melchor perceives them, is described just as fully—enough for the reader to draw a picture: build, facial features, manner and the rest. I thought of those six-part detective series on TV, because every other visual detail is also there, as though Melchor’s eye is a camera. ‘To his left is a skinny woman in her thirties, tough-looking with short, curly brown hair, holding an iPad in her hands and with a red heart pierced by an arrow tattooed on her collar bone; this is Sergeant Pires. Melchor knows her from the odd meeting in Tortosa, but he’s never noticed her tattoo before, or maybe she’s just had it done.’ Don’t ask me why Cercas has Melchor’s male gaze come back to this tattoo four more times in these chapters…
…or, for that matter, why Gomà, the deputy inspector in charge, excludes his Gandesa counterpart and his sergeant from the investigation. He does it publicly, and makes it clear to everyone on the case, including only two from Gandesa alongside his own more experienced team, that they mustn’t be told a word about anything. This is on the Sunday morning following the murders the previous night and, to fast-forward to the next day, Sergeant Blai practically begs Melchor to break Gomà’s no-disclosure rule. He, Blai, knows more about Terra Alta than anybody else on the force, and Melchor knows it. But he still regrets telling him, after a lot of pressure, that he’ll think about it. It’s classic, I suppose. If he tells Blai anything, he might jeopardise something that Gomà turns out to be right about. If he doesn’t, maybe he’s letting Gomà do something underhand, which Blai would spot. We don’t know yet what Melchor is going to do.
Lots of other stuff happens in the two chapters, 1 and 3, that take place in the present-day timeline. It’s almost all of the sort you would expect in this kind of procedural thriller. Gomà allocates jobs to different officers, mainly to do with questioning absolutely everybody who either travelled through the secluded area around the house or made a mobile phone call via the nearest communications mast. He is a stickler for the rules, knowing exactly how far they can go within the boundaries set by the court. He also wants the family to be questioned and fingerprinted, including the daughter who is likely to be the only beneficiary and others. Cook, housekeeper, everybody. Not the maid, because Melchior had found her upstairs, not the victim of torture this time, but of a single gunshot to the head. So it goes.
What else in the investigation? Basically, Gomà gives the impression, and is very explicit in letting everybody on the team know it, that they will have to be as patient and painstaking as he is. He is the only one who is smartly dressed, and it’s like a metaphor. Everybody else might be in jeans and polo shirts, but this man knows it’s the highest-profile case any of them have had to deal with, ever, and he’s the one to do it right. Meanwhile, Melchor mostly keeps his own counsel. Only once during the long briefing does he make a contribution, and it’s when Gomà asks about enemies the dead man might have had. Salom, the other Gandesa cop on the case had said no but, based on what his wife had said, Melchor suggests that he hadn’t been universally loved at all. He chooses not to mention he had heard it from her…
…perhaps because he keeps work and family completely separate. He is very, very aware of how lucky he is to have such a loving, attractive, supportive wife, and a beautiful little daughter to love him too. When I read it, I guessed that they are going to be put into serious danger, or worse. The idyll of family life he enjoys is straight out of a commercial for something almost cloyingly wholesome, filmed through the same lens as the skinny woman sergeant we met earlier. His wife is nothing like her. As he looks at her, while chewing on the long-postponed breakfast-lunch she’d prepared, he ‘remembers how he met his wife, when he first arrived in Terra Alta, and a cold thread like a twinge of desire runs up his back.’ I bet it does. Exhausted as he is, the thought of bed—he’s already in his pyjamas—only makes him desire her more. Their banter isn’t pretty. ‘“To bed with you, don’t be a pain, go to sleep.” Melchor smiles, takes her hand and pulls it down between his legs. “I’d sleep much better after a good screw.” “Fuck, poli.” Olga laughs. “You’re always ready to shoot.”’
This is how Chapter 1 ends, after his long night’s journey into day. Chapter 3 takes up that timeline from his setting off for the police station a couple of hours later—but in between there’s been a whole chapter of back-story. We’ve been partially prepared for something like this throughout the first chapter, to the extent that all the half-explained references to some murky past events made me wonder if this novel might be a sequel to an earlier Terra Alta novel. But no. Before he saw the error of his ways and became a cop, Melchor was the low-life son of a sex worker, working as a heavy for a criminal drug cartel. I’m not making this up—but Cercas is, and the story could hardly be more lurid if it tried. Thank goodness for the redemptive power of a good book. Seriously.
I might be missing something. This chapter of biography, beginning with his inauspicious birth and ending with his realisation that he needed to become a cop, is in the same hardboiled style as the present-day chapters. But this time, it’s the underside of society. ‘His mother’s name was Rosario and she was a prostitute. As a young woman she worked in brothels on the outskirts of Barcelona…. She had once been a beautiful woman, with a wild, intense, working-class beauty, but her charms did not survive the ravages of her profession and the corrosion of age and, by the time Melchor reached adolescence, she was selling herself at knock-down prices, outdoors.’ It’s OK, Javier, we’re all grownups here, we can take as much of this stuff as you want to throw at us. A bright boy with no life chances? Ok, so he gets to a good school, but things go wrong when you have no father—or you have to guess which of the secretive nocturnal visitors might be Dad—and your mother has no idea what to do with you. And you get thrown out of the decent school. And you fall into petty crime, so the local magistrates know who you are. And you get noticed by the small-time local drug dealers. Et cetera.
So you’re inside, on remand, and things don’t look too good for you. You had been doing well, but even before the drug boss gets busted you’ve got a black mark against you. You braked too hard and gave him an accidental knock in the back seat when you saw your aging mother getting roughed up at a street corner. OK, it might not have been her, but the damage is done and when things go wrong for the boss you’re going to get no help from anybody when you’re arrested and your trial is due to come up. Except… that mother of yours wants you to have a washed-up lawyer take on the case, and he promises to get you a light sentence if you’ll only keep your nose clean. You think, because you always do, what the fuck? But something changes your mind, he takes you on, and you get that light sentence he promised you.
And, in jail… nothing. Except there’s this old, clever, cynical guy nobody messes with. And he reads. And you tell him reading is for losers. And he says fine, stop wasting his time. Et cetera. However, bit by bit, in spite of the cynicism you feel to be your birthright and your contempt for books, he gets under your skin. And, in the end, he tells you not to bother reading Les Miserables, in the original French, because why would you bother with the greatest book ever written? But you do. And… et cetera. You have no idea how it happens, but it does. The guy’s insistence that French is not so different from your native Spanish—they’re both bad Latin, he tells you—turns out to be true enough for a bright young man like you, and something about the book hooks you. But it isn’t Jean Valjean’s conversion to a cloying Christian do-goodery that speaks to you. It’s the unstoppable, terrifying single-mindedness of his pursuer, Javert—especially when your mother is found beaten to death, and the case goes cold because the police can’t find enough evidence. What to do? Obsessively read and reread Les Mis? Certainly. But then you go to see the lawyer, Vivales, who has kept an interest in you and often visits, and you say, ‘I want to study. I’m going to be a police officer.’ End of chapter 2—and I’ve said enough about Chapter 3 for now.
23 September
Part 1, Chapters 4-5
Part 1—and Part 2, I checked—are written to a pattern of timelines. Odd chapters are the present-day investigation. Even numbers are the back-story. It hadn’t been hard to guess this as soon as Chapter 3 opened… and that’s about as much as I’m going to say about it. Except, getting the structure right is no bad thing, and I’m guessing that before the end, the back-story will bring us up to that fateful Saturday night shift. But in Part 1, Melchor only gets as far as making a pretty good name for himself in Barcelona, his home territory, before being transferred to the quiet backwater of Terra Alta. He had, rather fortuitously, become involved in a standoff with Islamic terrorists, and had used his ill-gotten skills as a crack shot—did I mention the training he got as a gang member?—to shoot three of the bad guys in the head. The move is going to be temporary, supposedly—but we already know how a rising star in the city might meet somebody and be happy to settle down.
Before that, in the back-story… stuff. Once Vivales realises Melchor isn’t kidding about wanting to become a cop, things go remarkably smoothly for our boy. There’s a law stating that nobody can apply for the police force until they’ve been out of jail for three years, but Vivales magics up a forged paper stating that his client has special dispensation to be fast-tracked. And, once he’s gone back to school to get the qualifications he had missed out on as a kid, the only way is up. We know he’s bright—the narrator has told us, and not just anybody would be susceptible to a life-changing novel in a foreign language—so the police course and exams don’t cause him any difficulties. And nobody mentions his criminal record, even after he’s got a job and feels secure enough to pursue his own unofficial investigation of his mother’s death…
…until somebody does bring up his record. Some jobsworth in the hierarchy knows he’s been sniffing around, and tells him that somebody with a past he’d rather forget needs to keep his nose very clean indeed. Otherwise, who might get to know all about it? Damn. But our man is as stubbornly determined as he is clever. And good at talking to people. And street-wise. So after a month or so, he’s back pursuing his own line of inquiry. Only the sex workers who were with his mother when she was last seen would be able to help, but… et cetera. Eventually, he tracks down the last one, 600 kilometres away. She can only tell him that his mother was so desperate by then she broke her only rule, getting in the car of some young guys with money to throw around. And no, she can’t remember any details beyond that. But at least he makes friends with the woman and her husband, who knows all about her past life, and who is happy to have settled down with, yes, his first love when they were kids.
It’s on the drive back, not far from home, that he gets the call to divert to where the terrorist incident is happening. And the rest is history. The jobsworth, or whatever he is—the reader can only guess how he or his bosses might be connected to the death of Melchor’s mother—tells him his heroism has wiped the slate clean. But, he tells him, it would be a very good idea… et cetera. Getting rid of a thorn in the side of somebody with a guilty secret? I couldn’t possibly comment.
In Chapter 5, Melchor and Salom spend Monday talking to the top managers at the company, and to the Adells’ daughter Rosa and son-in-law Albert Ferrer. This is a whodunit, among other things—I’ll come back to one of the other things—so everybody’s a suspect. Even Rosa, the devoted daughter and her husband? Maybe. But she appears to be devastated by the loss, only having felt properly ready to talk to Salom—an old friend of Ferrer’s from college days—on the Monday afternoon. They get details from her that tend to confirm what Olga had told Melchor about her Adell’s Opus Dei membership. As he got older, he became more fearful of death. But despite his closeness to the Church—there’s the obligatory photograph of the Adells with the Pope—it was something he never made a big thing of in public. Meanwhile, the old woman had always been religious, and had been the one to bring Rosa up in the faith.
The first interview of the day had been with Grau, the old man’s lieutenant. He’s old himself, of course, having been headhunted by Adell 50 years before—he resisted for some time—and having only agreed on condition that his salary would always be double Adell’s own. Grau is an unlikeable character, described in those wizened, dried-up terms that unsympathetic old people often get in novels. He shows zero emotion about the deaths, although he is fully dressed in his now oversized outfit of mourning clothes. He tells Melchor and Salom nothing you wouldn’t expect, beyond confirming that Adell micro-managed the company right until the end. There was never any doubt that he was 100 per cent in charge, and Grau seems—what?—grudgingly admiring, in his dried-up, cynical way? He’s certainly sincere about the massive economic benefits the company has brought to the region, saying this while he badmouths Ferrer, the son-in-law, for his uselessness and the local population for its lack of drive, imagination, gratitude…. What would the town be without everything Adell brought with him, working his way up from less than nothing?
This is when, I think, he mentions the Civil War. No doubt Spanish readers don’t need to be reminded that the area’s only claim to fame is that it’s where the battle of the Ebro took place, notorious as the most savage of the war. And this is, perhaps—how should I know?—the most important of the other things I mentioned about these chapters. Catalonians have long memories, and even though Adell would only have been a child during the Civil War, I bet it’s somehow connected with his death. But never mind that. Who will run the company now? Who will benefit most from the deaths? Rosa would inherit everything and Ferrer has been sidelined for years. He’s ‘the public face’ of the company—Salom tells Melchor how he had been good-looking and confident since before their college days—but Ferrer says it was simply because the old men couldn’t cope with the 21st Century, and felt threatened.
So, what do we know? Not much, obviously. Every possible clue and motive might be a red herring, including everything to do with Rosa and her husband. Is Ferrer’s drinking habit a new thing, or is he always in the habit of constantly topping up the whiskey in his glass from the late afternoon onwards? He seems reluctant for them to interview Rosa, while she’s so upset, although she seems very willing when she leaves her bed to come and find them. Is there something he’s covering up—and if so, does it stretch as far as the murder of both his parents-in-law? Or is the combination of his clear resentment of the way he had always been sidelined with the fact that his wife stands to be very rich, no more than one of the red herrings?
I’m never very good at predicting the outcome of whodunits. I haven’t mentioned Salom as a possible suspect yet, but a) he is very close to the daughter and, especially, the son-in-law; b) he had been very robust in his insistence that old Adell was well-liked and that he couldn’t imagine him having any enemies; c) Rosa and her husband ask him to act as their spokesman, if Gomà will allow it, and he jumps at the chance. But Grau’s motive is just as plausible, including both that he is clearly as resentful as Ferrer about having always been sidelined, and that he is a cynical old crow without a shred of empathy. OK, he’s a friend of the family, including Rosa—who seems OK—but, so what? His tyres fit the tracks discovered outside the house after the murders, but that’s got Red Herring written all over it—and he doesn’t even attempt to hide the fact.
There’s other stuff. I’ll come back to the key things I’ve missed when it becomes clearer that they’re important. But before I read on, just one more thing. All through Monday, Vivales has been trying to phone Melchor, and he keeps not being in a position to answer. Is he right to think that it’s just his mentor wanting to show support during the biggest investigation of his career? Is Melchor right to wonder, not for the first time, whether Vivales might be his father? And, meanwhile, does Cercas really have to make the sex talk between Melchor and Olga so dreadful? This is how Part 1 ends, and I won’t say another word about it.
‘“Should I be jealous of Rosa Adell?” / Melchor explores her gaze, trying to understand; he swiftly understands and, in slow motion, a naughty smile spreads across his face. “Depends how you behave yourself tonight.” /Olga shakes her head very seriously and bangs her empty glass gently on the table. “This is not a decent house.” She laughs. “It’s a bordello.”’
25 September
Part 2, Chapters 1-3
It’s all happening. And the fact that it seems I was right about a couple of things makes me wonder if Cercas is trying to go beyond the straightforward demands of a whodunit. Yes, it was Albert Ferrer who arranged the murder. Yes, Salom is an accomplice, tampering with evidence on behalf of his friend. And yes, Melchor’s life in Terra Alta is too good to last, so Olga has to go. It’s a good job Melchor can trust Vivales to look after the girl who might be his granddaughter while he, Melchor, can pursue his obsession to the bitter end. How bitter? Will he survive, or will his Javert complex lead to a similar outcome? After all, after he’s beaten up Salom prior to forcing him to turn himself in—in fact, we’ve only seen him walking towards the police station, with Melchor watching outside like some ghastly agent of destiny—Salom makes him look into the dark recesses of his own soul.
‘“You’re a murderer, that’s what you are. You can see it in your face, in your eyes. I noticed the first time I saw you. Tell me something: you enjoyed killing those kids, didn’t you? Those four terrorists in Cambrils, I mean. You liked it, didn’t you? Tell me the truth, go on. You can tell me. Did you enjoy it or not?”’ Well, did he? We don’t know, but he doesn’t stop Salom twisting the knife, taunting him that he daren’t go to Ferrer’s house because he knows he would kill him if he did. “No, Melchor, you’re no better than me. … You’re worse. Much worse. And you know it, don’t you?”’
Well? ‘Melchor nods, as if he really did know it, and wonders if the other man is right. Then he feels like punching him. Then, for the second time in recent days, he feels like crying.’ Cercas has put his man through the mill since Olga was run into by a car, supposedly in an attempt to injure her that went too far. Somebody—according to Salom, it’s Ferrer—wants to warn Melchor off the case his superiors had shelved after six fruitless weeks. But Cercas, wants to raise the stakes, which is why he has poor Olga fracture her skull on the pavement’s edge as she falls. This isn’t just a whodunit any more—although we know there are more revelations to come—poor old Melchor is living through an existential crisis.
All this happens in Chapter 3, and Cercas has been setting it up since the start of Part 2. And, of course, he continues to open up new opportunities for speculation that might or might not be relevant. Including details within the back-story that chime with what is happening in the present…. But I’d better rewind. Part 1 opens with what seems like a surprise. Gomà tells Melchor and Salom that the investigation is being abandoned—and it’s only a page into the chapter that we’re told that six weeks have elapsed. Melchor isn’t happy, and does his best to persuade the others. But their minds—including Salom’s, of course—are made up. Gomà and the judge have made their decision… and the reader wonders, not for the first time, whether the painstaking methods of the outsider from Tortosa might be a smokescreen. Is Gomà in cahoots with Ferrer? If, indeed, it is Ferrer who is masterminding all this, and not the other chief suspect, Grau. We only have Salom’s word for it that it was all Ferrer’s idea, after he had discovered that Adell was going to leave half his fortune to Opus Dei.
There’s another complication, which might be a red herring. On the night before the murder, there had been the usual Saturday evening meal at the Adells’ house, mainly an opportunity for top management to mull over the past week’s business. And for Adell and Grau to argue, as they have done for fifty years. Except on this night—Melchor, along with the reader, wonders why nobody had mentioned it before—Ferrer stops arguing against Adell’s plan to close the Mexico branch and joins him against Grau. One of the lesser managers present tells Melchor, in a convenient crossing of paths in a cake-shop, that this was a surprise. Ferrer had made no secret of his diversifying in Mexico, but nobody can know what contacts he had made there, or what his motives might be. Did he and Grau arrange the murder to ensure that some lucrative undercover sideline of theirs in Mexico could continue? Or not?
Melchor is investigating secretly, having been told categorically by the chief of the Terra Alta station that he mustn’t. He, the deputy inspector kept off the case, is close to retirement, and it’s easy to believe that he’s just looking for a quiet time. Meanwhile, Sergeant Blai, the one who had been furious at being excluded from the start, isn’t quite so robust in his orders. He has to protect his own back and, when Melchor keeps disobeying the order, he tells him he really, really has to stop. But… he’s still resentful about how he has been treated, and Melchor knows he can trust him. He’s the one who eventually takes a risk and lets Melchor use his computer and password through two Saturday nights, and find the fingerprint evidence only the forensics team could have hidden. Which, after Melchor has punched him a few times, is when the forensics officer tells him it was Salom who had done it. Melchor remembers the circumstances, and realises it’s true.
I don’t think I mentioned that Melchor really does have a broad streak of righteous violence about him. It’s nearly always to do with the mistreatment of women, behaviour that immediately brings out his inner nutter. In his time with the Barcelona police, wife-beaters and the like tended to get severely roughed up by ‘somebody’ behaving almost as a vigilante. This sets a pattern for what comes later, including a touching scene of him seeking out Olga’s abusive ex and giving him a good kicking, particularly, several times, where it really hurts. Clearly, it wasn’t only marksmanship he learnt in his previous life. That’s in Chapter 2, which brings us from his quiet early weeks in Terra Alta to his meeting with the attractive and intelligent, but slightly damaged-looking librarian who takes an interest in his reading. And to the weeks and months after that, when she gives him more modern books than his beloved 19th Century classics, and he gets her to read his own favourite. It’s a marriage made in the fiction section—not that we’ve reached that point yet, or the birth of the daughter they name after the heroine of Les Mis.
So what do we know, or think we know, with only one present-day chapter to go? And what is still a matter of speculation? The first you know about—the blame might go right to the top, both of the regional police and Adell’s company. We know that Salom was involved, and Ferrer’s fingerprints were definitely at the scene of the crime. The forensics team had photographed them, but Salom had made them too blurred to be useful. We definitely don’t know who sends two emails to Melchor, after an under-the-radar request to anybody local who might know something. The first prompts his first computer search of the company managers’ statements, drawing a blank, and the second tells him to look at the fingerprints. Ah. Cercas doesn’t always make it too hard for his man, and the only person I can think of who might suspect something is Rosa. But different characters keep reminding Melchor that everybody knows everybody else’s business in Terra Alta, so who knows?
Other things we don’t know. Is the tyre-track at the crime scene a red herring, possibly deliberate on the part of the murderers? What, if anything, has been going on in Mexico? Is Melchor ever going to learn that sometimes, if you try to pursue justice to the end, it can lead to some unexpected and dangerous outcomes? Who is Vivales? Is Cosette going to survive—as does her namesake in Les Mis, unlike Javert…. And why the appalling torture, not only of Adell but of his wife? Why does Melchor overhear a story from the Battle of the Ebro, when Franco’s forces, at the end of a long battle, decide not to machine-gun the few surviving Republican soldiers who have been ordered to make one last, suicidal push? Is it important that the Civil War is all that the old men of Terra Alta ever talk about? And, finally, is there going to be a moment of redemption for Melchor? If so, what can possibly bring it about?
First, though, no doubt a chapter to give us all a poignant reminder of Melchor, the happy years.
26 September, later
Part 2, Chapters 4-5—to the end
All my speculations were wrong. Yes, Ferrer did it and yes, Salom helped him. He doesn’t do anything underhand at the police station after Melchor turns him in, and confesses that everything Melchor found out from him is true. The tyre-track was a red herring, placed there by Ferrer to implicate Grau. Nobody else in Terra Alta was involved… but here comes the rabbit out of the hat—it was all the idea of some old guy we’ve never heard of living in Mexico. In fact, he masterminded the whole murder plot, so he could pay off a grudge going back nearly eighty years. The tiniest of hints were there, if we go back and look for them—Cercas isn’t going to break all the rules. A defensive author might argue that the reader shouldn’t see this new character as, well, not so much a deus ex as a diabolus ex machina. Ferrer couldn’t have done it on his own, but a thuggish old boss of a business empire could, driven by a smiling, disease-ridden fixation on revenge. Sometimes I wonder what it is that Cercas has against old men.
Of course, before the revelations of Chapter 5, Cercas needs to round off the back-story. The much shorter Chapter 4 holds few surprises—Melchor has to work hard to get Olga to believe he isn’t just like all the other men, but we know he’ll get there in the end. She’s fifteen years older, had given up on men after one too many bad experiences, and… I can’t remember much more about it. She finds she’s pregnant, no surprise after the days and weeks of their perpetual lovemaking. They discover they are going to have a daughter, decide by mutual agreement that there’s no other possible name than Cosette, and get married. The chapter ends with them at home, not having bothered with a honeymoon, picking up their reading aloud of Les Mis. At the end of Book 1 comes this: ‘Fate abruptly brought together, and wedded with its resistless power, these two shattered lives, dissimilar in years, but similar in sorrow. The one, indeed, was the complement of the other. [. . .] To meet was to find one another.’ See, he says, he told her this book was all about him, but—wait for it…. ‘She took off her glasses and shook her head slowly. “Not anymore, poli,” she said. “Now it’s about us.”’ Aww. But you can see what I mean about the back-story chapters chiming with the ones set in the present day….
In Chapter 5 we find out that yes, Ferrer was doing well in Mexico, but that all the doors he found opening for him were unlocked by the old Mexican businessman who had taken him under his wing. But Daniel Armengol, as he’s called, wasn’t doing it out of the goodness of his heart, or because he admired Ferrer so much. He did it because he discovered, by chance, that Ferrer was the son-in-law of the man he hated most in the world. He, the Mexican, had put together a cunning plan—far cleverer than anything Ferrer could have devised—and persuaded the gullible fool he had ‘seduced,’ as he calls it, to do all the dirty work. He makes Ferrer believe it’s for his own advancement, and to prevent Opus Dei from getting the millions that were rightly his. Of course, Armengol had made it all up about Adell’s bequest, but it was plausible enough to convince the strutting son-in-law.
I mentioned hints, although the clues to the truth seem almost like a formality to me. The whodunit plot, we realise as the old man tells his story, is subordinate to more abstract concerns. And these are all to do with what, let’s face it, is a literary McGuffin. Les Miserables. We don’t realise the extent of the connections until near the end, and I’ll come back to that…. But those hints. We realise, eventually, that the hapless Ferrer must have realised only after the event that he was being taken for a ride by the old Mexican—hence his extreme nervousness on that first Monday. Melchor had always said it looked like a professional job, and had never been convinced that Ferrer and Salom had told the whole story. He’s right, of course, as he mulls over the inconsistencies. Why the savage torture? Why do Opus Dei know nothing of the bequest? Why the clumsiness of the fingerprint and tyre-track evidence, when everything else is so professional? (Those are down to Ferrer, of course.)
Cercas could have had Melchor find out through Ferrer, I suppose, but the Les Mis thread means a different thriller trope would be useful. Melchor is knocked out by a couple of armed heavies near the flat he’s rented since Olga’s death, and wakes up between the two men in the back of a car with dark tinted windows. He guesses this is the end, and isn’t comforted by the muzzle of a gun sticking into his side. But guess what? It’s the only way that Armengol can think of to bring him to his hotel suite, so he can tell him all about what he’s been up to. It’s preposterous, but never mind. As readers, we’re OK to be suddenly plunged into an action movie, because it ties up a lot of loose ends. And the most interesting of these aren’t directly connected to the crime plot. It’s about an event arising from the Civil War, but which happened a few years afterwards. Ah.
Guess what. Armengol isn’t Mexican at all, but was born in Bot, the same town in Terra Alta as Adell, And their families knew one another. When Armengol was born at the beginning of the Civil War, Adell was ten years old—surely too young, we’ve thought all along, for the war to be anything directly to do with the murder…. But not too young at all, as it turns out. Cercas has been careful in counting the years, and although the war ended three years later, the brutality of the killings that started right at the beginning didn’t end. Armengol had described to Melchor how the war came to Terra Alta when Francoists rounded up and executed 23 unarmed men in Gandesa simply for being Republicans, and it’s no surprise that the reprisals continued for years after it.
Armengol’s father had left the country at the end of the war, but had been lured home eventually by Franco’s promise of an amnesty for all former Republicans. We know exactly how that’s going to go. Armengol can still remember how he, still a young child, felt that the family was complete again, and his father could live without fear at last. Except a radicalised young punk by the name of—guess—came up to him on the street, shot him in the head, then put another bullet in him on the ground to make sure he was dead. The young boy and his mother had left almost immediately and, after not very long at all, emigrated to Mexico. Ah, again.
He claims that not a day has gone by when he hasn’t thought about the murder. But he would never have done anything about it if he hadn’t met, at some business event or other, the jumped-up clown who had married the daughter of the man he hated most in all the world. You couldn’t make it up—but Cercas has, and now the story’s done.
Except it isn’t, of course. Armengol, despite the gangster movie way he’s abducted Melchor, has no intention of harming him. He just wanted him to know, that’s all. So, no hard feelings? Umm… tricky one. Melchor has been driven all the way to Barcelona, and it’s both ultra-familiar and strange to the street kid who’s turned into a country bumpkin. (His words, or those of Anne McLean, the translator. Not her finest, I’d say.) So he’s out in the big city, in the early hours, and he’s thoroughly bemused. An old man with no sense of humanity has told him he did it all for revenge. He has explained for example, quite matter-of-factly, how he’d told the killers to torture Adell’s wife, so Adell would have to watch her agony knowing that he’d soon be going through the same. What’s a cop like Melchor to do?
What would Javert do? Ah. Javert, driven by an obsessive insistence on justice, would—well, what would he do? Spoiler alert: we’re going to find out that what Javert does when he finally gets the man he’d been pursuing through one of the longest novels in European literature. He has mercy on Jean Valjean, realising, I suppose—I’ve never read it—that there would be no point punishing the man that he has become. But this doesn’t compute for Javert, who had always been able to rely on his cast-iron certainty of what justice is. He’s always been wrong, of course, because justice without mercy is no justice at all, and—another spoiler alert—he drowns himself in the Seine. Meanwhile, is Melchor going to do what he always does, and turn in the sociopathic old monster? Would there be any point, when the man has come all the way from Mexico not only to crow over his triumph but because Spanish doctors are much better equipped to deal with the dying? Which Armengol is doing, as is clear from the nursing care he’s getting, the hideous contents of his colostomy bag and, not least, because he’s told Melchor quite frankly.
Barcelona doesn’t have the River Seine handy, but it does have the sea. So Melchior decides it’s time to take off his clothes and walk out into it. And, reader, he isn’t Javert after all. As he swims, mostly under the surface until his body begins to feel at one with the sea around him, he goes through the arguments. Until, if I remember it correctly, he realises he doesn’t need to torture himself. Is it a get-out clause for Melchor that Armengol will be dead long before any trial anyway? This is what Melchor himself wonders, but that isn’t why he decides not to tell what he knows. He has lost a wife—and, unlike in his mother’s case, her murderer will be punished for it. So, can he stop being an agent of just retribution now, and concentrate on the one woman of three in his life—his way of putting it—who still has her life before her? Can’t he learn to stop worrying and learn to love Terra Alta? Yes, he can—and Victor Hugo’s great moral question comes down to this. Do what you can, but don’t go too far. Give yourself a chance to live a little. He goes to Vivales’ flat, Cosette up, and says he’s leaving. Where to? ‘Home. To Terra Alta.’ Bless.
Maybe I should reread that underwater debate Melchor has with himself, to check that I’ve done justice (sorry) to how he works it out. But maybe sometimes you simply have to let go.
We can read it for you wholesale 