Of course, he had never autopsied anyone he’d known. Forensics, like surgeons, never open family or friends. They leave that to someone else. In Eugènia’s case, the girl had been working at the hospital from the age of twenty and everyone knew her, even if the two of them had never hit it off. Anyway, he knew next to nothing about her. Whether she had a boyfriend (he thought not) or friends or was happy at work. As far as he was concerned, Eugènia was merely the secretary he greeted politely when he went in and out of the clinic, and to whom, every so often, he handed reports to be sent to court. In the six years they’d worked in that department, they’d never had coffee together or commiserated over setbacks in their lives. The truth was, Eugènia was a completely unknown quantity.
Even so, it felt strange to think that tomorrow he’d have her naked and defenseless on the autopsy table. He wished the case had been assigned to someone else. He did remember one thing about her: she was very shy and quick to blush. Whenever he poked his nose into the secretaries’ office, Eugènia would immediately turn red and hide her less than attractive face behind hair that was as rough and black as coal. Poor girl, he thought, genuinely moved, she was so ugly that no man could ever have given her a second look. Of course he never had. He had just treated her like a piece of the furniture and avoided sitting at the same table when they were both in the cafeteria. As far as he could remember, he’d never paid her a compliment or smiled at her beyond the call of politeness. And he’d never done so because she was ugly and her ugliness made him feel uncomfortable. He regretted that now.
He shut the door to the cold room and decided to put her out of his mind. He must concentrate on the paperwork. He went upstairs and straight to his office, determined to bury himself in his private backlog of bureaucracy. However, before doing so, he switched on his computer to take a look at his e-mails, as he always did midmorning. And saw it. A message addressed to him from someone he wasn’t expecting to hear from at all. Name of sender: Eugènia Grau. His heart missed a beat. It was a short message, barely two lines. It started Dear Doctor and signed off with a Yours sincerely. In a neutral polite tone, Eugènia asked one thing of him: that he personally carry out the autopsy on her when she was taken to the morgue. Nothing else. That was it. Taken aback, he read that concise text several times trying to decipher a possible hidden meaning. Eugènia had left no suicide note but, for some reason that escaped him, before ending it all she had taken the trouble to perfume herself, make her face up, and e-mail him that highly unusual request. His stomach felt queasy. He didn’t know what to think.
He decided not to say a word and spent the rest of the morning sitting in his office pretending to work. Just before two o’clock he informed his colleagues that he had a headache and was going home. It was true his head was throbbing. He was on his way, walking past the secretaries’ office, when he stopped in his tracks. He’d had a hunch. In a flash he went inside and started rummaging in Eugènia’s desk drawers. He soon found them. There they were. A set of her house keys, with a note of her address. Yes, it was the address that was also on her card. After ruminating for a few seconds, he put the keys in his pocket and rushed out. As soon as he hit the pavement, the light of the midday sun dazzled him and he had to shut his eyes. A motorcyclist almost knocked him down. What the hell was he up to? Almost unaware, there he was, in a taxi and asking the driver to take him to the address attached to the key ring. His heart was racing and he found it hard to breathe. Let alone think. The girl lived by herself, on Floridablanca Street, very close to where they worked. The taxi got there in only a couple of minutes.
Eugènia’s flat was near the Sant Antoni market, in a district on the left of L’Eixample that had never lost its noisy working-class character. The market was the first to be built outside the city walls when they were demolished in the last third of the nineteenth century, and it retained its spectacular iron structure and bustling atmosphere. It was still the center of the busy commercial activity that characterized the neighborhood where Eugènia’s family had lived for nigh on a century. At the end of May 1909, Eugènia’s great-greatgrandparents had moved there with their burden of children, belongings, and debts, and the expectation they would find home comforts that were nonexistent in the tiny dismal flats in the old part of the city. Little did they imagine that the streets of their new neighborhood would very soon be transformed into one of the scenarios of violent conflict between workers and troops in the Setmana Tràgica and that smoke from burning churches would blacken the sky over their new start in life. It had been a short journey from where they used to live, a brief ten-minute exodus on foot, but far enough to leave behind that labyrinth of damp narrow streets prey to overcrowding, dirt, and poverty. Unlike the well-off middle classes who had migrated further, to the distinguished buildings the architects had erected on the right of Balmes Street, more modest families like Eugènia’s were forced to settle for those humbler flats on the borders of their old district. Now, together with the Raval, it was one of the most densely populated parts of Barcelona and home to most of the immigrants coming into the city. You only had to look at the head-scarves worn by the Arab women or listen to the melancholy voices of the men conversing in remote, incomprehensible tongues on street corners or sitting on benches. The frantic Babel of streets in Eugènia’s neighborhood was awash, as they had always been, with hope and rage, honest folk and hoodlums, next-door neighbors from way back and newcomers. Blocks and sidewalks harbored prostitutes and old dears going to their daily mass, pimps and shopkeepers, informers and plainclothes police. Traffic was nose-to-tail and car fumes polluted the air. There were few tourists strolling thereabouts. They preferred the beach or air-conditioned museums.
The block where Eugènia lived didn’t have a concierge. It must have had one once because there was a concierge’s cubbyhole, but at some point the neighbors clearly decided to install an automatic entry system and save money. Concierges are expensive, and it was still a modest neighborhood, however much the prices of flats had rocketed in recent years. It wasn’t difficult for him to find the front-door key, because there were only three on the ring. It was a narrow gloomy staircase, which at that time of day reeked of boiled cabbage. As it was summer and the windows were open, he could hear mothers shouting to their children to come and eat, and impatient, grumbling men demanding their dinner. Eugènia lived on the fourth floor (which was really the fifth) and there was no elevator. He gritted his teeth and started on the steep ascent.
Once he was at the top he opened the door and went into the girl’s flat, trying not to make any noise to avoid alerting the neighbors. What he was doing was probably not altogether illegal, but at the very least it was rather unorthodox. Forensic pathologists don’t visit the scene of the crime after the coroner has removed the corpse. It’s not part of their duties. Why was he doing it then? What was he hoping to find?