The Summer of Dead Toys by Antonio Hill

Author:Antonio Hill
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw
Tags: Crime, Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General
ISBN: 9780857521125
Publisher: Doubleday London
Published: 2012-06-15T00:23:58+00:00

18

Martina Andreu looked at her watch. Her shift finished in less than half an hour and she had just enough time to go to the gym before picking up the kids. She needed some good stretches; her back was killing her these days and she knew it was partly due to lack of exercise. She tried to be organized, but sometimes it was simply too much. Work, husband, house, two little children overflowing with after-school activities . . . She placed the papers from the Dr. Omar case in the file with a sigh of frustration. If there was anything that drove her crazy, it was cases that were going nowhere. She began to think this guy had taken off with his macabre music for somewhere else. It wasn’t a ridiculous idea at all: if the women-trafficking network had been his main source of income, now he had to find another way of earning a living. The blood on the wall and the stunt with the pig’s head could have been just a smokescreen, a way of disappearing in triumph, so to speak. Although, on the other hand, the guy wasn’t young. In Barcelona he had his contacts and that repugnant clinic. Maybe he wouldn’t earn enough to make him a millionaire, but certainly more than he’d make somewhere else, where he’d have to start from scratch.

The man’s personality was a mystery. The people of the barrio hadn’t contributed much information. She herself had gone door to door all morning, trying to find out anything, and the only thing clear was that the name of the “doctor” inspired distrust at the very least; in some cases, genuine fear. One of the women she’d spoken to, a young Colombian who lived on the same floor, had distinctly said: “He is a strange guy . . . I used to cross myself when I passed him. He did bad things in there.” She had pushed her a little more and had obtained only a vague “They say he takes the devil out of the body, but if you ask me I say he is the devil in person.” And from then on she was as silent as the grave. It wasn’t that strange, thought Martina: however surprising it might seem, a number of “exorcisms” took place regularly in cities like Barcelona, and given that now the City of Counts’ priests didn’t get involved in these affairs, believers in such things had to find alternative exorcists. She was sure that Dr. Omar was one of them. Searching his clinic had contributed very little but none the less significant evidence: a multitude of crosses and crucifixes, books on satanism, santería and other similar stories, written in French and Spanish. His banking transactions were ridiculous: he’d bought the flat for cash years before; he had no friends; and if he had clients, they wouldn’t go to the station to make a statement. Martina shivered at the thought that these things could still be happening in a city like Barcelona.

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