Read The Whispering City for Free Online

have been picked open; the garden gate must have been unlocked.’
    ‘Yes. And?’ Goyanes made an impatient gesture.
    ‘The neighbour gave us a description of the man she saw, but it wasn’t very helpful. That’s all we have for the time being.’
    ‘All right. Well, give it to the journalist nice and tidy, and don’t forget to say that we’re going to find the murderer soon. With a bit of luck, he reads the paper, and he gets nervous.’
    ‘Maybe.’
    Isidro waited until he was outside Goyanes’s office to mutter, ‘Fucking brilliant.’
    He repeated it again as he went down the stairs and passed two of his colleagues, noticing their breath. The one who walked past him on his right wrapped him in a cloud of poorly digested raw onion; the one on the other side left a trail of alcohol, the first splash in his morning coffee. Who knows how many more would follow it. Thinking that he didn’t have to work with Burguillos the drunkard gave him a spark of joy. It lasted for six, maybe seven steps. Until he remembered that a Señorita Ana María Martí Noguer from
La Vanguardia
would be waiting for him downstairs.
    ‘Fucking brilliant.’
    That last time he said it out loud. Over the next few days he would repeat it many more times, but to himself, because you didn’t say ‘fucking brilliant’ in front of a woman.
    The woman waiting for him was about twenty-five, maybe less. She was sitting on a bench in the hallway in front of his office. She kept her back very straight to avoid touching the wall, where many resting heads had left dark, greasy circles. Her hands were in her lap, her black jacket covering them like a muff. She wore a long skirt, dark stockings and flat shoes that couldn’t hide the fact that, when she rose to greet him, she was a couple of centimetres taller than him. ‘One sixty-nine,’ estimated Isidro, unwilling to concede all three of the centimetres that separated him from being a metre seventy. He didn’t like tall women – women taller than him. Nor did he like women who stood up to greet him and shook his hand firmly like a man. This one was pretty, besides. She looked at him expectantly, with enormous light brown eyes the same colour as her pulled-back hair; her plump lips slightly open as she smiled timidly, lifting her pronounced cheekbones and slightly square chin.
    ‘A magnificent skull.’
    That was what morbid César Sevilla would say to Isidro several hours later. He was the officer who had accompanied her to Castro’s office door. Sevilla bragged about his ‘x-ray’ eyes and he never missed an opportunity to make a comment about someone’s bone structure.
    ‘Long femurs, short humeri,’ he said about Commissioner Goyanes.
    ‘Asymmetrical clavicles,’ he might comment about a new arrest.
    ‘Holy Mother of God! That was some slap… you dislocated his inferior maxillary!’ he said about another after an interrogation.
    The first thing he admired about Ana Martí was her skull.
    ‘So, Señorita Martí, you’re covering Señora Mariona Sobrerroca’s death for the newspaper.’
    He invited her into his office.

     
    6
    This was Inspector Isidro Castro of the CIB? The man who extended his hand to her wore a poorly cut suit. It wasn’t a terrible fit, but it seemed too big and made him appear rectangular and stumpy. Legs too short, head too small, further reduced by his black, firmly pomaded hair, torso too big… but all her first impressions were erased as soon as he extended his hand and greeted her without smiling, ‘So, Señorita Martí, you’re covering Señora Mariona Sobrerroca’s death for the newspaper.’
    She had rarely heard a male voice as smooth, and as unsettling. It sounded restrained, with a deep tone, yet not low; a baritone in which half of the air expelled from his lungs didn’t vibrate his vocal cords, instead passing like a sigh along with the other sonorous half.
    The word ‘newspaper’ had emerged from his mouth loaded with disdain. She