At Close Quarters by Eugenio Fuentes

they looked and what their relationship with the victim was. It was there, in those pages, in the way each person acted, in their feelings of love, hatred or indifference, in the reactions to simple facts that eventually Cupido found the key to the mystery. Experience had taught him that only when he had managed to define those portraits which emerged from the shadows did the narrative hang together; moreover, he could never understand it unless he understood the protagonists, so that both elements – narrative and characters – cast light on one another, and in the end both truths converged: the objective, incontrovertible truth of facts, and that other truth, no less untameable, of feelings . When that hadn’t been the case, when he had only scratched the surface of places, actions, and people’s movements, the investigation ended in failure, in an absurd, hectic segue of comings and goings, routine questions and fruitless answers. To centre oneself on alibis was like coming into possession of tools and then being incapable of building anything with them. Such tools were essential , yes, but useless if not used correctly. That’s why Cupido asked about a person’s relationship with the victim rather than where he was on such and such a day at such and such a time.
    ‘That evening I rang my father up, like any other day,’ the woman started saying. ‘It was half past eight. I checked it several times in the phone memory, and the time fits with what forensics have established: that he died between eight and nine. The phone rang a few times before he picked it up. He said he couldn’t speak to me at that moment, as there was someone with him, though he didn’t say who. Then he said he’d call me back later. When he didn’t, I rang him back at eleven. He didn’t answer and I thought he might have gone out, on his own or with a colleague, as in the morning he’d had that meeting I told you about.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I wasn’t worried yet. But the next day, after taking my son to the bus stop, I tried again. As he wasn’t answering I rang his mobile. It was turned off or out of reach, and I imagined he must still be busy with that business of closing down the base. I began to get worried at noon, when I still couldn’t reach him. I called his office and they told me he hadn’t come to work, they assumed he was ill. It was then that I began to suspect that something was wrong, as he didn’t normally miss a day of work, not even to be with Gabriela.’
    ‘Who’s Gabriela?’ interrupted Cupido.
    ‘The woman he’d been seeing for a few months.’
    The detective wrote down the name in his notebook, but before he could ask, she answered his next question.
    ‘My mother died four years ago, while she was undergoing plastic surgery. In theory, it should have been a simple operation, but there were complications with the anaesthetic and she never came round. Since then, my father had barely shown any interest in a woman, until he met Gabriela. He fell in love with her. He never told me so in so many words, but he couldn’t hide how much he wanted to make her happy. I mean, in that respect, he didn’t have any reason to take his own life either. I don’t think he felt lonely.’
    Cupido nodded slightly as he looked at her hands: she was wearing a ring on each, but neither was a wedding ring. That didn’t mean he should assume anything about her marital status, as heknew some married people who didn’t wear rings, but then he remembered that, when she had rung and they arranged to meet an hour later, she’d mentioned something about needing to get someone to mind her children. He’d have to ask her about that too.
    ‘I think Gabriela reminded my father of what he went through four years ago: the same grief and emptiness when you unexpectedly lose someone in your family.’
    ‘Did she lose her husband?’
    ‘No, much worse – her son. Her only son, a teenager. My father suffered a lot when he lost my mother,