Elena Arrieta had spent twenty years appraising other people’s misfortunes for an insurance company, and she had learned to distrust stories that were too tidy. Julián Olaso’s fitted into two lines: on Sunday night someone had smashed the window of his study and taken forty-two gold doubloons from a display cabinet. A three-hundred-year-old collection, gathered with a collector’s patience and insured for nine hundred thousand euros.
The stone manor stood on the edge of the village, at the end of a lane lined with chestnut trees. At the iron gate, the postman was rubbing his ankle. “Watch out for the mastiff,” he warned her. “He barks at the leaves.” Inside, Olaso received her in the living room with a blanket over his knees. Bruno, seventy kilos of wheat-coloured dog, lay down at his feet and rested his head on his owner’s slipper.
The old man told his version unhurriedly. He had gone to bed at eleven and slept straight through, and it was Rosa, the housekeeper, who found the cabinet open at eight in the morning. Bruno had spent the night where he always did, chained beside the study door. In the valley people said that dog was the best alarm in the district, and none of the neighbours had heard a thing.
Three other people had keys. Tomás, the gardener, had been trimming the hedges on the estate for a decade; every morning the mastiff greeted him with an uproar of barking, and he had given up saying hello. Rosa had started work three weeks earlier and still crossed the kitchen with a crust of bread in her hand, just in case. And Marta, the daughter, had come back from London the day before the theft, after six years away and with debts her father preferred not to discuss.
“When I arrived, that animal nearly ate me alive,” Marta told her on the porch, lighting a cigarette. “I had to wait in the car until my father came out to hold him.” She admitted she owed money, a lot of it, and that she had taken a sleeping pill that night. Elena wrote down every word. Then, without saying why, she walked round the house until she stood beneath the study window.
The grass was still wet with dew. Among the blades glittered dozens of glass shards, scattered in a fan almost a metre from the wall. Elena crouched, picked one up with her handkerchief and studied it for a long while. In her folder she had the latest change to the insurance policy: two months earlier, Olaso himself had asked to double the insured value of the collection.
She went back to the living room. The old man was stroking the dog’s huge head, and Bruno closed his eyes with a sigh. “Do you suspect anyone, Mr Olaso?” He took a while to answer. “My daughter,” he said at last. “God knows how hard it is to say it.” Elena nodded slowly, opened her notebook and wrote a single line. It wasn’t Marta’s name.