When she realised Gerard wasn’t beside her, Violeta gave a start. Half asleep, she stretched out a hand and touched the sheets: they were still warm, so he’d not been long gone. Perhaps he’d gone to the bathroom or to get a glass of water, she thought: after all, her own mouth was parched. A glance at her watch confirmed it was still quite early, and instinctively she turned her head and looked towards the window. From the mattress that acted as a bed and rested directly on the wooden floorboards, Violeta glimpsed the grey light of day that encouraged you to take things slowly, and, turning over, she closed her eyes intending to sleep a while longer.
* * *
The previous night he’d told her he’d only been living for four months in that down-at-heel mansion in the district of Vallcarca. The house, known by the nickname of the ‘butterfly house’, because of the brightly coloured Lepidoptera decorating the garden, was one of the many abandoned houses in the area transformed into squats by the anti-system movement in order to protest against property speculation in Barcelona. Nobody could remember who had put the butterflies there, but, as they were plastic, they’d survived the passage of time and become part and parcel of the garden. For years, the owners of the big house that, if one could believe the inscription on the façade, dated from the beginning of the twentieth century, had allowed the building to slowly crumble in the hope they’d get the necessary permissions to demolish it and replace it with a modern apartment block, a fate that, if nobody got in the way, would be the lot of most of the surrounding mansions. Some had lost their roofs and most supporting walls, and only a couple were intact enough to be habitable, even if in the most precarious conditions. With their slash-and-burn aesthetic and incendiary disenchantment, the squatters had taken apart tiled roofs, rebuilt walls, slotted in cables to siphon off electricity from street lighting, and covered the main façades with cartoons and political slogans. A dearth of green fingers had turned gardens into wild spaces, and, from the street, the tall, unpruned trees and ubiquitous weeds broadcast the state of neglect into which the buildings and land had lapsed. Rubbish piled up in gardens, and only in summer, when mosquitoes, flies and the stench became intolerable, did bouts of cleaning and excursions to waste-containers become more frequent.
The bedroom where Gerard had parked himself was cold and on the small side. It was in the attic, a long way from the main room where the squatters met to discuss politics, listen to music, drink beer and smoke joints. Like most of them, he too had screwed a chain on the door to make sure that one of the strangers continually going in and out of the squat didn’t rummage through his belongings. Not that he owned anything of value, apart from his laptop that he always carried with him, as a precaution, but everyone knew that now and then items of clothing went missing, as did packets of cigarettes and condoms.
You could see the mountain of Tibidabo from his bedroom window, and in the foreground, the rubble wastelands the large plots had become after the grand houses had been demolished. These wastelands ran down to the stanchions of Vallcarca bridge, some two hundred metres from the butterfly house, and demonstrated how much speculation and a quick-buck culture had changed the look of the neighbourhood. Now and then the Mossos were ordered to clear out one of the buildings and the heavy brigade descended and did its worst. In solidarity with their evicted comrades or under attack from the anti-riot police, the squatters then created an uproar that ended in street-fighting in the city centre, with baton charges, arrests, improvised barricades, burning containers and the windows of banks and shops smashed to smithereens.
Unlike Violeta, Gerard had yet to be arrested by the Mossos. Whenever there was a shit-show, Gerard tried to scarper and when that wasn’t possible, he made sure he wasn’t in the front line so as not to draw attention to himself.
‘In fact, I only came to live in this house because I needed a free pad where I could study and not have my father on my back all the time,’ he’d confessed to Violeta.
Gerard had only one year to go before he received a joint degree in maths and physics, and, with his first-class grades, he was convinced it would be easy for him to get a grant to enrol for a doctorate at Edinburgh University, in the very same department where Professor Peter Higgs had discovered the elementary particle that bore his name. In the course of his degree, Gerard had specialised in the Higgs boson and had the opportunity to be part of one of the teams experimenting with the particle collider on the Universitat Autónoma campus, and, as he told Violeta, he had high hopes of working one day with the British physicist’s students on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
‘So you’ll be going to Scotland next year?’ asked Violeta, hardly delighted by the prospect.
‘I hope so. But Edinburgh isn’t that far…’ added Gerard with a big smile.
While she killed time and made up her mind whether to stay a bit longer in the house or hit the road, Violeta found a packet of cigarettes and lit up. She’d not eaten anything and the smoke and nicotine made her stomach feel queasy, so she stubbed it out after a couple of puffs. She’d slept very little, smoked a lot and drunk over the odds, and felt rather hung over. Wondering whether it might do her good to drink something hot before leaving, she headed to the kitchen intending to brew up some tea.
Violeta was scouring the cupboards looking for an infusion to help deal with her queasy guts when she was startled by shouts from the garden. A voice was shouting for help. She rushed to the front door, and when she opened it she was shocked to see it was Gerard who was calling.
‘There’s a dead woman in the garden,’ she heard him mumble. ‘I think she’s been murdered.’
No money, no future - a motive for murder? The economic crisis has hit Barcelona hard, and a personal crisis might be about to hit Deputy Inspector Norma Forrester's family. When a body is found in the grounds of a former grand villa,now a student squat, Norma finds the case uncomfortably close to home. The downturn has turned the city into a breeding ground for crime, or is the motive more personal? Unable to stay away, although this case may represent a conflict of interest, Norma can't even count on the support of her forensic pathologist husband Octavi, who has more than enough to cope with following a major incident at the city's Prat Airport. When a face from his past appears, he and Norma are faced with choices and conflicts - just as her focus should be on finding the killer.
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