The agents of the Scientific Police freak out in color. The footprint found in a gas station in Madrid takes them not to a person, but to the collective imagination of Spain, to the most absolute incarnation of evil: it belongs to Antonio Angls, the mythical murderer, 30 years earlier, in 1992, of the Alcsser girls.
The man who killed and raped Mriam, Toi and Desir, who tortured them with unthinkable vileness and cruelty. The device prepares on the run, and so does the arrest. Thirty years following that televised horror, that massive catharsis, Angls lives in Madrid under the identity of a Mexican businessman. He has a wife and children. He is no longer that small-time criminal with murderous tendencies and loaded with Rohypnol.
He’s a well-groomed guy who speaks English and gets a manicure. Measure your words. Has a smart lawyer. Summer in Ibiza.
All of the above is obviously false. It has only happened in the head of Santiago Daz (Madrid, 1971), TV scriptwriter (600 episodes behind him, this year premiering on TVE Peace force), and a crime novel writer since 2018.
With the intention of transferring the so successful true crime television to the novel, Daz took Angls in its last known trance, when he threw himself into the sea from the ship City of Plymouth in front of Dublin on his maddened escape, and gave him a new life in the novel The other girls (Reservoir Books), now hitting bookstores.
The most widely used hypothesis is that Angls died trying to reach the Irish shores, but Daz wanted to answer the only question: “And if this uncle didn’t die and is around? Where would he be and what would have become of him?
The author set his imagination in motion: the sea drove England to shore, he was able to hide in an abandoned house and flee in the hold of a plane bound for Norway. There he was run over by mistake by an old man who took him into his home, in the middle of the field. Overcome the monkey by the lack of Rohypnol, his favorite drug, and quickly learning English and dedicated to the tasks of the field, the criminal number one of Spain created a new identity. He managed to clean himself, reset himself.
However, the goat threw the mountain and the monster kept beating inside: every time a defenseless girl crossed, on a journey that would take him across America and back to Spain, the wheels of blood turned once more and the psychoptic killer drug, the longing for absolute control over the lives of others, ran through his veins once more.
Keep in mind that Angls was not an idiot, explains Daz. Since he was 12 or 13 years old, he led the criminal gangs he was in, he was the one who had the upper hand and others did what he said. He worked, among many other things, as a camel and came from a very unstructured family, but he did not smoke or drink or do drugs. All he did was take rohypnoles, quite a few a day, but he was a much smarter guy than the petty sausages around him.
Clinging to it, Daz has built the Antonio Angls 30 years later, a psychopath sometimes more similar to the Patrick Bateman from American psycho than Catarroja’s bloodthirsty pimp, the most hideously cleansed product of a degraded social milieu.
I was interested in that transition for my fiction, to build another English … That was not so different, he says. Because, in the end, this fictional Angls I needed to keep killing, I needed to The other girls that I will leave on the way.
At this point in the text, reality breaks through. Daz tells how the National Police, the real one, not the one inside his head, stopped tapping Anglo phones in 2009. The judge in charge of the investigation gave an order that this be stopped in 2009, 17 years following the crime. The Police always thought that if Angls were still alive, they would contact his family at some point, but that did not happen. His sister Kelly, who lived for years in the United States, received a series of strange calls there. who at some point led the researchers to believe that it might be Antonio, but it was shown that it was not.
The termination of these punctures is indicated by the scenario that might take place if today, 30 years following the murder of the offspring, Angls was suddenly located and arrested.
According to the Penal Code, his crimes would have prescribed, as more than 20 years have passed since the events (yes, indeed: You will not be able to impute one of the terrible kennels to which he subjected the young women). However, the lawyers for the victims’ families would maintain, because they have done so during this time, that the prescription ends in 2029, 20 years following the last investigations carried out.
As Daz himself admits that this last hypothesis is legally preposterous -the Supreme Court or Europe would end up agreeing with Angls and say that he can no longer be accused of anything-, the detectives of his fiction follow an interesting path vice versa: instead of having victims and looking for the murderer, They catch the psycho and try to remake his way to unearth the safe corpses he has left behind … Recent corpses for which he may be charged with crimes that will lead him to jail.
That is an idea that I really wanted: build cases backwards, from back to front, says Daz.
So, back inside his meninges, we have the inspector sniffing into the past of this unexpected Angls Indira Ramos, the vehicle built by Daz to walk the reader through its pages (and also through those of his previous novel, The good father).
And there, around Ramos, the author has placed his narrative trinkets, now completely fictional: the woman has obsessive compulsive disorder, she urgently needs everything to be absolutely clean and orderly around her, and she also had an unexpected and secret daughter with her partner Investigator, Sub-inspector Ivn Moreno. And step, she was regarding to marry years ago with the one who now turns out to be the lawyer from Angls, Alejandro Rivero. The ones to give sauce to the subject.
At this point the question falls due to its weight: can we fit more crime novels? Is there really a market for a new batch of police investigators each year, each with their own hands and props? We might not identify here an inflation similar to that of the price of electricity?
Well, Santiago Daz laughs, I use a lot of crime fiction, I like it a lot and I think there is a lot of room for everyone. Also, in recent years we have come here TV scriptwriters, who we do it very, very fast, with short chapters that always make you read a little more. I think we have brought something new. But yes, it cannot be denied that it is increasingly difficult to do something different in the crime novel. Dynamism is, true, one of the main values of this, let’s say, fast novel that does not beat around the bush and goes straight to the turrn of the action, without prolegmines or magreos.
A Daz, without too many subtleties or style pretensionsHe was interested in getting into Antonio Angls’s head, putting himself in his shoes, climbing the ladder of crime with him from his first instincts: He had already been in jail for raping and nearly killing another girl to whom he had done many things that he later perfected, so to speak, with Alcsser’s girls.
The Catarroja murderer, in effect, carried out a dress rehearsal shortly before his emergence as a terrifying popular icon: in 1990, kidnapped, chained, beat and prodded a 20-year-old woman named Nuria Pera, who, apparently, had stolen a few grams of heroin. The woman did not end up like Mriam, Toi and Desir by a miracle thanks to the intervention of a brother and the mother of Angls. However, despite the conviction, the system believed that Angls was reinsertible and gave him an opportunity in the form of a six-day permit on March 5, 1992.
The then proto-assassin took advantage of it. Jams returns to Picassent, And he was in search and capture when he left a rope, setting the stage for his crimes, in the shack of La Romana, in a lost mountain, very close to the Tous dam, already fooling around with his fantasy: to get hold of several very young girls and wear them to death.
l ya I knew what I wanted, clearly, explains Daz, who has reconstructed the real events of the book from the statements Miguel Ricart, henchman of Angls that terrible night, and the police and judicial reports. The escape from his home in Catarroja, when he jumped five meters from his window, reaching down with a sheet, is told as is. I just had to fill in how he got from Cuenca, where a man saw him, to Lisbon, where he embarked for Dublin.
As we go from hypothesis, let’s launch one: What if the Angls family sue Daz for making up his life? That is not going to happen, they have repudiated it and disregarded it. That’s why I hardly show them in the book. No, the only thing that might happen here is that he would denounce me himself … But if that were so, it would be because he would have appeared and would have more important problems than my book.
Daz has not contacted the girls’ families before, during, or following the book was cooked, but It is known to him that several of them have open investigations every time they get a tip that someone like Angls has been seen in Sweden or America … It must be a tremendous wear and tear. One thing however is certain: in everything that has to do with Alcsser, reality will always, in any case, surpass fiction.
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