Free The Sentinel: 1 (Vengeance of Memory) by Mark Oldfield Page B

rejected the principles of rigour and precision Galindez had worked so hard to apply to her own work. For Galindez, Luisa’s work seemed more like storytelling, taking strands of dubious evidence and weaving them together with vague and insubstantial theories.
    Galindez wondered if she could do it better. Rather than leave people like Guzmán as vague footnotes in the Civil War’s catalogue of death, maybe she could use them as case studies, making their wartime activities public knowledge? She had the technical knowledge. Her background and scientific expertise would give her the necessary gravitas. She began to think about the opportunities: conference papers and journal articles bringing the darkest secrets of the Civil War to light. There would be benefits for others as well as a major benefit for her: a way out of the organisation Papá loved. The organisation that was grinding her down. She could leave behind the endless bagging up of remains, the hours of working alongside sweating men in fatigues who stood back to discuss her culo as she bent over the heaps of bones, debating whether she was a six or a seven.
    Thinking of Papá kindled a familiar sadness. She recalled Tia Carmen telling her stories of how much he loved working for the guardia . Until the day he walked out of the door and climbed into his car without even a cursory look underneath. Why would the Basques want to kill me , he’d laugh whenever ETA was mentioned. There are plenty of guardia nearer the Basque country for them to target . He really thought he was safe. Until that morning when the explosion flung his car into the clear spring air, burning debris falling in an arc of fiery metal rain. The sound of the exploding petrol tank, the smoke, the lurid swell of the flames. Men running, Mamá screaming. Distant sirens. A little girl’s frightened cry. Papá .
    They got away with it, Galindez thought, her nails digging into her palms. No one was going to find his killers now, seventeen years later – least of all her. There were many in the guardia civil who’d tried – why had she ever imagined it could be her who would bring his killers to justice? That had been just an adolescent dream, though the thought that one day she might succeed sustained her through interminable nights of lonely study and revision. Hoping that by tracking down his killers she could become something more than that tragic little girl, Miguel’s daughter. The one faces turned to when she entered a room. That’s her, pobrecita. So sad. First the father, then the mother as well. They say she drank, you know. But look at the child. Poor little thing. Enough. It was time to acknowledge that Papá ’s killers had faded into history. Impatiently, she wiped away a tear. It seemed possible when I was fifteen. I’m twenty-five now. Time to get real, Ana María. Time to put that grief aside, although it’s not as if I ever grieved for him really. Not the way people expected. There was an explosion and he died and so did everything I knew up to that moment. It wasn’t my fault I couldn’t cry at his funeral. Or Mamá’s for that matter. God knows enough people tried to make me. Tia Teresa even pinched me to try and get the tears flowing. And afterwards, the shrinks treated me like I was a freak. As if a man in a white coat had the right to try and make an eight-year-old cry.
    But even if she’d never been able to express her grief, that didn’t mean she had to abandon her longing for justice. Uncovering Guzmán’s shadowy activities – and maybe others like him – might still be possible. She began to think about how it could be done. Develop a profile of the man, gather evidence of what he did, how he did it, who he did it to. A comprehensive catalogue of Guzmán’s career. But that was where the problems began. Guzmán was in charge of a secret unit. They didn’t have annual reports, didn’t send out press releases on successful operations like today’s guardia .