Fortress of Evil

Javier Cercas

A Terra Alta Investigation

Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

First published in the Spanish language as El castillo de Barbazul

by Editorial Planeta, S.A., in 2022

First published in Great Britain in 2025 as A Bill Swainson Book by

MacLehose Press

An imprint of Quercus Editions Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK company

The authorised representative in the EEA is Hachette Ireland,

8 Castlecourt Centre, Dublin 15, D15 XTP3, Ireland (email: info@hbgi.ie)

Copyright © 2022, Javier Cercas

English translation copyright © 2025, Anne McLean

The moral right of Javier Cercas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Anne McLean asserts her moral right to be identified as the translator of the work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

EBOOK ISBN 978 1 52943 623 5

www.maclehosepress.com

Fortress of Evil

A Terra Alta Investigation

Other books by Javier Cercas

Soldiers of Salamis

The Tenant and The Motive

The Speed of Light

Anatomy of a Moment

Outlaws

The Impostor

Lord of All the Dead

Terra Alta Investigations

Even the Darkest Night

Prey for the Shadow

The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Novel

For Raül Cercas and Mercè Mas,
my Terra Alta

Part One

Terra Alta

The first memory Cosette had of her father was very vivid: she was snug in the deep well of a child’s safety seat in the back of a car, and, in front of her, at the wheel, he announced that her mother had died. They were leaving Terra Alta and her father wasn’t even looking at her in the rear-view mirror, only inside himself or ahead, at the ribbon of road that was taking them away towards Barcelona. Then her father tried to explain the significance of what he’d said, until she understood that she was not going to see her mother again, and from that moment on, they were on their own and would have to get along by themselves. There were two other memories associated with this first one, both just as vivid, both glazed with a sense of menace. In the first her father appeared beside Vivales, the lawyer who had been the closest thing to a father her father had ever known. This memory took place immediately after the first one, in a deserted cafeteria with huge windows, a place she would recognise years later as El Mèdol service station, on the Mediterranean motorway. Her father and Vivales talked while she climbed up and slid down a slide in a children’s play area (she sensed that the two men were talking about her, about her and her dead mother); then her father drove back to Terra Alta and she went to Barcelona with Vivales. Her third memory was of Barcelona, and Vivales also appeared in it but her father disappeared or only appeared at the end, after she spent several days at the lawyer’s house, with him and with Manel Puig and Chicho Campà, his two best friends, who didn’t leave her side day or night, as if some abstract danger loomed over her and that outlandish trio of former military service comrades had assumed the mission of defending her, until one morning at dawn her father reappeared and, like a knight in shining armour, dispelled the danger and took her back to Terra Alta.

The memories Cosette had of her mother, however, were blurry or borrowed. More blurry than borrowed: because, no matter how much she interrogated her father as a child, he had barely told her anything about her mother, as if he had nothing to tell or as if he had so much to tell that he didn’t know where to start. Her father’s reticence contributed to Cosette’s idealisation of her mother. Although for different reasons, she also idealised her father, which was not easy: after all, he was a flesh and blood person, while her mother was just a phantom or a mirage that she could embellish as much as she liked. When she was a little girl, especially when he was working as a police officer, Cosette considered her father a sort of hero, the knight in shining armour who came to her rescue at Vivales’ house; more than once she’d heard him say that the worst bad guys are the ones who seem good, and she was sure that he possessed a natural talent for detecting and combatting them, that he was moulded from the same material as the heroes of the adventure novels that, as far back as she could remember, he’d been reading to her at bedtime, and the same as the sheriffs or gunfighters in the old westerns that Vivales liked.

Her relationship with her father was very close, especially in her childhood. He treated her with coldness or with what an impartial observer might have considered coldness, in a distracted way, self-absorbed and slightly absent. This didn’t annoy Cosette, partly because she didn’t know anything else and partly because she thought that, in real life, that’s what heroes were like: cold, distracted, silent, self-absorbed and a little absent; also, Cosette counted on, at least for an hour or an hour and a half a day, her father emerging from his abstraction and devoting himself unreservedly to her. This was the moment when, before she let herself drift off to sleep, he read stories to her: then a warmth welled up from inside him, a deeper intimacy and enthusiasm than any display of affection; then a feeling of communion she would never feel with anyone else ended up binding her to him, as if the two of them shared an essential secret that was theirs alone. As Cosette approached adolescence, however, she gradually became convinced that her father’s sombre reserve was not an inherent personality trait, but the poisoned fruit of her mother’s absence; she was also invaded by the complementary suspicion that sometimes her father was searching for her dead mother when he looked at her and found only an everyday and diminished version of her. That was how the phantom (or mirage) began to take shape and that was how she began to fight against it unknowingly, or simply to try to live up to it. It was a combat destined to fail, of which she herself was not even completely aware and which could have destroyed her, or at least turned her into a diminished, subdued and insecure being.

It did not. During her childhood, Cosette and her father led a calm, orderly life. He took her to school every morning and, if he had an early shift at the station, he went to pick her up in the afternoon; if not, her best friend Elisa Climent’s mother would pick up both of them and take them to play football or to do their homework at her place, until he came to get her once he’d finished work. Later, when her father left his job at the police station, the two friends would often go together to the library where he’d started to work, which was very nearby, and do their homework or read or study for exams, and then her father would take them to training or home. Some weekends Cosette slept over at Elisa’s place, and other times Elisa slept at Cosette’s.

Cosette was not a bad student, but she wasn’t a great one either. Although she loved reading, she wasn’t interested in literature classes, or history, or the arts in general; she did have an innate talent for mathematics, though. Her teachers described her as a level-headed, measured, modest, stubborn student lacking a competitive spirit. This last trait did not prevent her from being very fond of sports and a member of one of the school’s football teams; nor from showing a talent for chess, which led her to participate in several tournaments – she won three: two local and one regional – and forcing her father to learn the rules of the game to try to challenge his daughter in matches he initially lost with humiliating speed. Her teachers at school also described her as an imaginative girl, endowed with a great facility for escaping into her fantasies.

None of these descriptions surprised her parent; Cosette was only partly mistaken: he was a distracted and self-absorbed father, but he spent many hours with her and knew her well. Even though they both liked living in Terra Alta, every once in a while they ran off to Barcelona, and every summer they spent some time in El Llano de Molina in Murcia, with Pepe and Carmen Lucas, two friends her father had inherited from his mother. The older couple was in permanent contact with them, writing emails, phoning them, and encouraging them to visit during the rest of the year, which they did a few times. Cosette adored them and they adored Cosette, who over the years had built up a group of friends in the town, some of whom lived in El Llano all year-round. Cosette knew her father also enjoyed those bucolic interludes, in spite of the fact that all he ever did there was read, take long siestas, go running in the orchards and have long conversations with Pepe and Carmen, especially Carmen: her father was never able to develop an interest in horticulture, but in the afternoons he would accompany the former prostitute and last friend of his mother to her vegetable plot and spend hours sitting on the ground reading, leaning back against the wall of the shed where she kept her tools. As for Barcelona, after the death of Vivales, Cosette and her father started spending occasional weekends in the flat the lawyer had left them in his will. Her father had chosen to keep it exactly as Vivales had left it, not because of a sentimental superstition about conserving the phantasmal presence of the lawyer in the place he’d lived as long as he’d known him, but simply because he didn’t know what to do with it. During those excursions to the capital, they went to the zoo, the Science Museum or the cinema, and more than once they had dinner with Puig and Campà, almost always at the home of the latter, who invited them to banquets in honour of Vivales where they dined like decadent emperors. They often spent Saturday mornings or afternoons at Internet Begum, the cybercafé the Frenchman ran in El Raval, chatting or reading or playing chess, or even helping her father’s old friend with his business, who would later reward them for visiting by inviting them to a restaurant on the Rambla or in the Raval. One afternoon, after the three of them had eaten at Amaya, Cosette, fascinated by the expressive ebullience and enormous humanity of the former librarian of the Quatre Camins prison, asked her father where he had met him.

“Around,” he answered.

“Around isn’t anywhere,” Cosette replied.

They were in a shop in Ensanche, buying breakfast for the next morning, and her father turned towards her with a box of Kellogg’s cereal in his hand and an unmistakable look on his face thinking that, even though Cosette was only ten, she didn’t deserve to be lied to.

“I’ll tell you later,” he said.

At that moment Cosette didn’t know whether her father had made that promise to get her off his back or to fulfil it, but a couple of hours later, when she reminded him, she understood that he was not going to tell her the truth. He had never recalled his past previous to Terra Alta in front of her: he hadn’t told her that, like Carmen Lucas, his mother had been a prostitute, or that she’d been brutally murdered, he’d never spoken of his wild childhood in Sant Roc, or his unknown father, or his furious orphaned adolescence, or his time in reformatories and job as a drug dealer and gunman for a Colombian cartel, or his arrest during a firefight in the Barcelona Free-Trade Zone, or his high court trial in Madrid, or even his time locked up in Quatre Camins and his lasting friendship with the Frenchman. Her father had never told Cosette those things, and nor did he now: he dispatched her curiosity by explaining vaguely that they had met when the Frenchman was working in a library, that thanks to the Frenchman he had discovered Les Misérables and that, thanks to Les Misérables, he had discovered his vocation and become a police officer. Cosette sensed that her father was lying, but also that he was lying with the truth.

“I don’t believe you,” she laughed. “The Frenchman has never worked in a library in his life.”

Cosette felt that her intuition was confirmed when she saw the look of relief on her father’s face when he answered:

“I give you my word of honour that he did.”

From that night she drew three conclusions. The first was that the best lies are not pure lies, but lies mixed with truth, because they enjoy the flavour of truth. The second was that her father was hiding his past from her on purpose, which did not contribute to weakening the aura of a knight in shining armour or hero of adventure novels or sheriff or gunslinger her imagination had wrapped him in. The third was that she should read Les Misérables.

That very week she asked her father to read her Les Misérables, but he seemed unsettled by the request; in any case, he resisted. He argued that he hadn’t reread Victor Hugo’s novel since shortly after Vivales died, he argued that he didn’t know if it was a good idea to read it to her now, he argued that, even though it was a novel that had changed his life, she might not like it, or not yet (she might like it later, he argued, for example, when she reached the age he was when he first read it), he argued that it was vast, he argued using a sentence the Frenchman had said to him back when he first discovered it: “The writer supplies half of a book, the other half comes from you.” To Cosette, who knew she was named after the daughter of the protagonist of Les Misérables, all these arguments seemed inadequate or absurd, and in the end they did nothing but increase her desire for her father to read her the novel.

Finally, she convinced him. They devoted three and a half months to reading Les Misérables. Cosette did everything she could to try to like it, but her disappointment was huge: from the first moment the book seemed to her like a tedious, sentimental, demagogic and ultimately boring melodrama, and Javert – the righteous and inflexible policeman who inflexibly pursues the former convict Jean Valjean throughout the whole story, and who for years had been a role model for her father – strikes her as a nasty, relentless, mechanical character lacking any trace of the moral courage or tragic greatness her father had admired in him. Cosette wouldn’t have used those words to describe her impressions of the character and the novel, but that’s how she felt. She also felt something worse, and it was that, even though her father had tried to read the novel with more warmth, intimacy and enthusiasm than ever, it did not awaken in her the usual feeling of communion between the two of them, as if that novel did not contain the essential secret they had shared up until then; or, on the contrary, as if precisely that secret were revealed in the novel, showing however its dramatic emptiness or its deceit. Despite that, Cosette did not ask her father to stop reading it to her every night and, while the experiment lasted, she made a superhuman effort to disguise her disappointment: perhaps expecting that at some moment the novel would take flight and acquire a belated but incomparable fulfilment; perhaps she thought that the responsibility for her disappointment did not reside in Les Misérables but in her, in her incapacity to add to the book the other necessary half, that which would allow her to access its complete meaning and which her father was able to add. Whatever the case, after he read the final page of the novel, Cosette only managed one lapidary response to the predictable question her father asked:

“A bit long, isn’t it?”

It was the last book they read together.

1

Melchor is waiting for Cosette at the Gandesa bus station café, drinking a Coca-Cola and reading a novel by Ivan Turgenev called Smoke. Apart from him, there is only one elderly couple sitting at a table, holding hands, their travel bag on a nearby chair, and a man talking to the owner at the bar. Melchor doesn’t know the old couple but he does know the others: the woman who runs the place is a single mother in her thirties from Arnes; the man, a youngster with tattoos and porcupine hair, is the owner’s cousin, lives in Gandesa, is unemployed and comes in every evening to have a cup of coffee with her, chat for a while and, if it gets busy, give her a hand. It’s half past seven. The amber-coloured light shining from some wall lamps makes the café feel vaguely like an aquarium. On the other side of the large windows, night has already fallen on the avenida de Catalunya, over the Hotel Piqué and, in the distance, over the Carvalls mountains, over all of Terra Alta.

Cosette has been on holiday for five days with Elisa Climent, and Melchor is looking forward to seeing her; he is also a little apprehensive. He wants to surprise his daughter, so he hasn’t told her that he’s waiting for her at the station. Now that she’s seventeen, this isn’t the first time Cosette has been away for that length of time, or even the first time without any adults. But this is not like the other times. Cosette and Elisa had been saving up for months to go on this trip; a trip that, in the imagination of the two friends, had or aspired to have, in principle, a symbolic or milestone aspect: that year they were finishing secondary school at the Instituto Terra Alta, and next year, also in principle, they were both planning to leave the region to start university, and might end up going their separate ways. In recent weeks, however, uncertainty had begun to undermine Cosette’s plans: she’s no longer sure she wants to go to Barcelona to study mathematics, as she’s been planning for years, or if she even wants to take the selection exam, the preliminary step to admission to university. One concrete reason explains these sudden insecurities: weeks before setting off on that trip, Cosette discovered by chance that her father had been lying to her for fourteen years about her mother’s death. She did not die in an accident, as her father told her at the time: she was killed; the hit-and-run that ended her life was not random, as she had always believed, but deliberate: the culprit was Rosa Adell’s first husband and the main defendant accused of Rosa’s parents’ murder, who had run her over to intimidate Melchor and prevent him from continuing to investigate the Adell case. The exhumation of that buried crime by chance angered Cosette, who is furious not just because she’s understood that her mother died as a result of her father’s righteous obstinacy; she is also furious that her father hid the truth from her. Since then Cosette has been harbouring the feeling that her entire existence has been built on a fiction, the irrational certainty that she does not know her father and that all she believed she knew about him was a lie, that all the values he incarnated for her were mistaken, toxic, and all that she had lived until then was an utter fraud. This is the reason the father–daughter relationship has been poisoned and, a few days before she left, Cosette confronted Melchor and accused him of deceiving her. Melchor did not deny it, did not protest; the accusation was true: if he hadn’t deceived her, he had at least hidden the truth from her (which represented a refined form of deceit). That’s why he has spent these five days hoping that Cosette might reconsider and understand his motives for behaving as he did; he has also tried to arm himself with reasons that will enable him to convince her that, even though he might have made a mistake, he did it with the best intentions, thinking he was doing the right thing. And that’s why he is now there, in the station café, anxious to see her again, ready to explain, to tell her he is sorry and persuade her to forgive him.

At eight the bus from Tortosa pulls in, parks in a loading bay, drops off some passengers and picks up the elderly couple who had been in the café now bustling with a group of hikers. There’s still twenty minutes before the last bus from Barcelona gets in and Melchor feels like another Coke, but he changes his mind because the recent arrivals are laying siege to the bar, eager for sandwiches and drinks, which obliges the owner’s tattooed cousin to help her.

Melchor goes back to Turgenev. He is still an indefatigable reader of novels, especially nineteenth-century novels. When his relationship with Rosa Adell began, he wanted to diversify his reading diet a little and tried to get into crime novels, which were Rosa’s favourite reading then. He read quite a few and enjoyed some. After a while, however, he tired of them, or maybe he underwent a regression in taste, because he returned to his nineteenth-century novels, which Rosa, a reader of eclectic and changeable taste, also ended up enjoying. Melchor calls his relationship with Rosa a relationship because he doesn’t know what else to call it. He can’t call it a marriage because they’re not married, although Rosa would like them to be; in fact, she has proposed to Melchor several times, but has always met with his refusal. His argument is invariably the same: the richest and most powerful woman in Terra Alta deserves something better than an ex-cop turned librarian; she would end up regretting it, he concludes. Rosa doesn’t know if Melchor is serious or joking (in fact, she doesn’t know if he knows himself), but she has tried to contend with that argument, always in vain; on occasion she has wondered whether the real reason Melchor doesn’t want to marry her is because he doesn’t want to marry a woman fifteen years older than him, not to mention a childhood friend of his first wife. In any case, Rosa has accepted the life they lead and is happy with it; much happier, she assures anyone who wants to listen, than she’s ever been before.

Melchor and Rosa do not live under the same roof, but they see each other or speak on the phone every day, they sleep together with the frequency of newlyweds and Rosa’s relations with Cosette are as cordial as Melchor’s with Rosa’s four daughters; the latter’s is not as close, however, among other reasons because none of Rosa’s daughters still lives in Terra Alta. Melchor, for his part, loves Rosa, admires her goodness, her cheerfulness, her intelligence, her discipline and her fabulous capacity to take on work; but, maybe because what he feels for her is nothing like what he felt for Olga, he doesn’t know if he is in love with her, and he’s not interested in finding out. He has not really understood that she is in love with him; in fact, deep down he thinks Rosa’s love is based on a misunderstanding, and that this misunderstanding will sooner or later dissolve and their relationship will end. Apart from that, everyone around them, as well as half of Terra Alta, knows that the president and proprietor of Gráficas Adell is the romantic partner of one of the police officers who, fourteen years earlier, was involved in solving the Adell case, the murder of her parents; this slightly macabre coincidence was the region’s top gossip at first, where a fleeting future was unanimously foreseen for the couple, but eventually it was accepted by everyone as one of the eccentricities of that uneccentric couple.

Melchor looks up from Smoke at the moment the last bus from Barcelona turns into Gandesa and drives up avenida de Catalunya towards the station. So he stands up, pays for his Coca-Cola and goes outside to meet his daughter. A group of passengers gets off the vehicle and swarms around the luggage compartment to collect their belongings, and for a moment blends in with the group waiting by the door to board. Melchor looks for Cosette in the crowd, but doesn’t see her; he does, however, see Elisa, who is walking towards him with a backpack full to bursting, a spring tan and two octagonal boxes of ensaimadas hanging from a coloured ribbon. The girl stops in front of Melchor, who, still searching in vain for his daughter among the hustle and bustle of the station, asks:

“Where’s Cosette?”

Elisa replies, with a serious look on her face, that Cosette has stayed in Mallorca; then she blinks as if she didn’t know what else to say, or as if she knew, but didn’t know how to say it. Melchor stares at her. The girl is the same age as his daughter, has a freckled face, blue eyes, straight, blond hair, which is a bit messy; she’s wearing a pair of esparto sandals, a summery dress and denim jacket. Knowing something has happened, Melchor asks:

“Has something happened?”

“No.” Elisa puts her backpack down on the ground, but not the boxes of ensaimadas, and looks at him again trying to appear more confident. “Cosette is fine. She told me she was staying because she needed to think. And that, when she arrives, she’ll call you to tell you.”

“Think?”

“Yeah. She says it’ll just be a couple of days and that . . .”

Before she can finish her sentence, Melchor takes out his mobile phone and dials his daughter’s number while urging her to go on:

“And what?”

“She’s not going to answer,” Elisa warns him.

She’s right: Cosette’s mobile rings, but no-one picks up. When it goes to her voicemail, Melchor turns his back on Elisa and takes a few steps towards avenida de Catalunya. “Cosette,” he says. “It’s Papá. I’m at the bus station with Elisa, she’s just arrived. Call me, please.” He hangs up and walks back over to the teenager, who has hoisted her backpack onto her shoulders again.

“Don’t worry,” Elisa insists. “Cosette is fine. She just wanted to take a couple more days’ holiday.”

“What about you?” Melchor asks. “Why haven’t you taken them as well?”

“Because I’ve got things to do here.”

Melchor nods without conviction. He’s never had a real conversation with Elisa, but has known her almost since she was a baby, thinks he knows what she’s like and he’s sure that, although she will try not to lie to him, she’ll also try to cover for Cosette. A bit dazed, he asks:

“Has Cosette met someone?”

She shakes her head energetically.

“No,” she says. “Well, nobody like the way you’re thinking.”

A WhatsApp chimes from Melchor’s mobile while the girl says something Melchor doesn’t understand. The WhatsApp is not from Cosette, but from Rosa. “Is she back yet?” it reads. “Dinner at my place?” Melchor looks up at Elisa, but, before she can finish her sentence or say anything, another WhatsApp arrives, this time it is from Cosette. “Papá, please don’t call me. I don’t want to talk to you. I’m fine. Don’t worry, just give me a bit of space.” Melchor raises his eyes to Elisa again, and for a couple of seconds looks at her without seeing.

“Is it her?” Cosette’s friend asks.

Melchor shows her his daughter’s WhatsApp.

“I told you she wouldn’t pick up,” Elisa reminds him, after reading it. “She wants to be alone. She told me that too.”

Now it’s Melchor who doesn’t know what to say. After the first moment of surprise, he feels that what has just happened doesn’t really surprise him so much, that perhaps he had gone to wait for Cosette because he had a feeling that, if not that, something similar to that might happen. “Do you have money?” Melchor types on his phone. “Yes,” Cosette writes straight back. “I’ll come back when I run out.” Melchor is about to write another message, asking his daughter to be careful; however, he thinks it is too obvious, too paternalistic and, biting the bullet, he decides to show his confidence in her by sending a thumbs-up emoji.

“Well,” Elisa says when Melchor looks up from his phone, abstracted again, looking at her again without seeing her. “I have to get going. My mother’s waiting for me.”

Melchor reacts, takes Elisa’s backpack and, carrying it, offers to drive her home while telling Rosa by WhatsApp that he’ll be coming for dinner on his own.

Elisa lives with her mother on the outskirts of town, on the road to Bot, not far from the first apartment Melchor had rented, eighteen years ago, when he took refuge in Terra Alta after shooting four armed Islamists on the promenade in Cambrils. During the drive, he interrogates Elisa. Elisa tells him that the two friends spent the first two days of their holiday in Palma, in a hotel near S’Arenal, sunbathing on the beach in the mornings, walking around the old quarter of the city in the afternoons and going to bars and clubs at night. She also tells him that on the third day, instead of moving to Magaluf as planned, they’d taken a bus to Pollença or to be precise to Port de Pollença, got a room in a cheap hotel and spent the next two days lying on the beach, swimming in the sea and dancing in a nearby nightclub, and they only left the port one afternoon to visit the town of Pollença, and once to visit a place called Cala Sant Vincenç. He listens to his daughter’s friend, paying close attention to her words. Just before his clash with Cosette, when she had been behaving in an unusual way, distant and surly, for several weeks, Melchor talked to Elisa, who had told him his daughter was going through something but she didn’t know what it was, and now he can’t bring himself to ask her if she’s figured out what was going on with her and whether Cosette has told her about the argument they’d had the night before the trip, perhaps because he’s sure the answer to both questions can only be affirmative. He does bring himself to ask, however, if she’d noticed if his daughter seemed worried during those days; Elisa says no, but then clarifies and says a little, although no more than she has been since, weeks ago, she began to have doubts about what she should study, or if she should even sit the selection exam or not.

“Has she told you she doesn’t want to go to university?” Melchor asks.

“She’s told me that she doesn’t know what to do,” Elisa says. “Maybe that’s why she decided to stay away a couple more days. To figure it out. To have time to think.”

It’s the second time he hears Elisa say that, but this time he thinks he detects in her words a false note, as if the girl is rehearsing what she just said, as if rather than saying it she has recited it.

They have arrived at Elisa’s house, and he doesn’t want to pester her anymore. He gets out of the car with her and carries her bag to the front door, kisses her on the cheek while telling her to give his best to her mother and finally he cannot help but ask if she thinks she’ll speak on the phone with Cosette that night.

“I don’t know.” Elisa shrugs. “I don’t think so. But don’t worry: if she tells me anything, I’ll text you.”

Melchor thanks her and attempts a smile, but can’t manage one.