The Book of Murder by Guillermo Martinez; Sonia Soto

Author:Guillermo Martinez; Sonia Soto
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective - General, Detective, Mystery & Detective, Mystery, Fiction - Mystery, General, Psychological, Suspense, Mystery fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 9780143115809
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Published: 2009-07-28T04:40:07.538000+00:00

Seven

I followed him down a wide corridor with an oak floor. There were several doors leading off it, all closed. He opened the end door and we went into his study. The first thing I noticed was the large window looking on to an unexpected sunken garden, with several trees, and climbing plants covering the walls. In the fading light I could see an immense desk covered in books and papers, with two rows of drawers, and a swivel chair in front of it. A laptop occupied a small space in the middle, between piles. A chaotic jumble of yet more papers and books seemed to have accumulated at different times on a table in the centre of the room. Kloster motioned me to the only other chair, miraculously clear, and started searching through desk drawers. At last he seemed to find what he was looking for, pulling from the bottom of a drawer an old, slightly creased TV listings magazine with an actress I didn’t recall on the cover.

“This is the only photo of Mercedes I’ve kept. Here she is, as she was when I met her,” he said, handing me the magazine. I realised it was his way of explaining why he’d married her, of showing me the only, misguided but excusable, reason. Across the years the hairstyle looked slightly ridiculous, but the face and eyes were captivating. The sensual pout still achieved the desired effect, and there was something resolute in the full curves of the body, displayed with studied nonchalance. I thought to myself that it must have been difficult to take your eyes off her. Kloster switched on a lamp and went to the window. He stood with his back to me, looking out at the deepening gloom of the garden, as if he wanted to keep away from the photo.

“Not long after we were married, before Pauli was born, I started noticing the first signs of…instability. I suggested we separate but she threatened to kill herself if I left. I believed her. We had a sort of truce and, with desperate cunning, she made sure she got pregnant. She had an appalling pregnancy with a series of complications, but I couldn’t tell if they were real or imaginary. After the birth, Mercedes was exhausted and stayed in bed for a month. She rejected the baby. She wouldn’t touch her, she wouldn’t even let me bring her near her. I had terrible trouble convincing her to hold her long enough to breastfeed. She said Pauli had drained her completely and was now sucking the remaining life out of her. It was shocking to see: she really did seem to have lost something irrevocably during the pregnancy. Her face had become bloated, her features sunk in fat, and she didn’t get her figure back. When at last she got out of bed she started eating with cold determination, like an automaton, as if she wanted to do herself as much harm as possible. And, as if it had flown off and alighted intact, all her beauty was superimposed on Pauli’s little face.

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