The Exile (42 page)

‘Thirteen thousand letters done so far. We're almost finished,' Galíndez said.

‘Cool. Does that mean you can you start your analysis soon?'

‘It does, though first I'm going to check to see if there's any missing data. Then, if everything's in order, I'll start analysing it.'

‘Isabel says you're brilliant with statistics.'

Galíndez frowned, about to point out that Isabel might not be the best qualified person to comment on her statistical abilities. She checked herself. ‘I know what I'm doing, put it that way. My speciality is profiling, that relies heavily on stats.'

Claudia looked up, impressed. ‘Do you do a lot of profiling in the
guardia
?'

Galíndez shook her head. ‘I was about to transfer to the profiling unit last year but then I was injured and someone else got the post.'

‘Can't you reapply when you've completed this project?'

‘I'd like to.' Galíndez was suddenly uncomfortable recalling the events of the last year and went back to her computer. She immersed herself in the data, the rattle of keyboards around her fading as she focused on the familiar procedures of data analysis, losing herself in the manipulation and transformation of data, shaping it into meaningful tables and summaries, eliciting patterns and relationships that might answer her questions. People thought such things were complex. Galíndez found the rigour and precision of the work reassuring.

Claudia pulled her chair closer. ‘Can I watch? I don't get to use these methods often. Profesora Ordoñez says it introduces a barrier between the researcher and her subject.'

‘Of course you can,' Galíndez said. ‘Luisa – I mean Profesora Ordoñez – has a very fixed view of how research should be carried out.'

‘I've noticed,' Claudia said. ‘Although she said much the same thing about you.'

Galíndez frowned. ‘Luisa forgets we have to adapt our research methods to fit the situation. We can't interview a lot of these people because they're dead. If we didn't have these letters, the parents' complaints about their children being stolen would be lost for ever.' She took a deep breath. Luisa's rigid antagonism to scientific method always annoyed her.

‘Don't get angry, Ana,' Claudia said. ‘We're all really excited to be working on this project. Have you seen the posters some of the students put up?'

‘The one saying, “We want the truth about the stolen kids”?' Galíndez nodded. ‘I think it's great that you all see the value of this.'

‘No, that one.' Claudia pointed to the wall above the sink.

Galíndez's eyes widened as she saw another home-made poster, though this time the photo was of her, wearing her dark suit, sunglasses pushed up into her hair as she completed the interview with RTVE. A caption in bold letters:
¡Forza Galíndez!

‘This isn't about me,' Galíndez said, suddenly self-conscious.

‘It's about doing the right thing, getting justice for people who wouldn't get it otherwise,' Claudia said. ‘It's great to be a part of your investigation. That's why we all come in early: we want to do a good job for you.'

Galíndez looked at her for a moment, lost for words. Then she changed the subject. ‘Right, I'll show you how I analyse the data.' Claudia watched as she typed commands into the software. ‘OK, here's a frequency table showing responses for question one. Let's see what type of obstetric unit had the highest rate of baby thefts.'

‘OK,' Claudia muttered, concentrating on the tables.

Galíndez tapped the screen with her pen. ‘This table shows where the thefts occurred. The column headed
n
is the number of responses and the column headed
per cent
is the percentage of all cases each response represents.'

Q1: Facility where Child stolen

‘There!' Galíndez said, ‘you can see at once where child thefts were most frequent.' She tapped the percentage column with the tip of her finger. ‘Over half of all the kids reported as stolen in these letters were stolen from private obstetric facilities and thirty-six per cent of cases involved facilities run by the Church.'

‘So why is the figure so high for private clinics?' Claudia asked.

‘Probably it was easier for them to avoid scrutiny. If there were any complaints, they'd be investigated by their own staff.'

‘But couldn't the parents have gone to the
policía
?'

‘A lot did,' said Galíndez. ‘But the police were often corrupt and didn't investigate. Some police officers were even involved in the thefts. In any case, doctors and medical staff back in Franco's day had very high social standing. It was hard to challenge their authority.'

Claudia glanced at her. ‘Did you think life was really so bad during the dictatorship?'

‘I wouldn't know.' Galíndez smiled. ‘I was born eight years after Franco died.'

Claudia's expression suggested she wasn't sure when that was and Galíndez had the feeling she'd just been reclassified as old. She was still considering that when something touched the back of her neck. Startled, she turned, surprised to find the students crowded behind her, watching her impromptu demonstration of data analysis. Engrossed in her work, she hadn't even been aware of them leaving their seats. A few were holding up their phones, capturing on-screen events for later viewing.

One of the students raised her hand. ‘May we ask questions now, Doctora Galíndez?'

‘I suppose.' Galíndez nodded.

She spent the next ten minutes dealing with questions about methods, about using the software and discussing the problems researchers encountered with various types of data. As she got onto the topic of advanced data analysis techniques, she decided to call a halt to things.

‘Will you be demonstrating those techniques later?' someone asked. It took Galíndez a moment to identify the source of the voice, finally realising it came from one of the students sitting cross-legged at her feet.

‘We still have more letters to code first. When you've finished entering them, I'll take you through the analysis step by step if you want.'

The students' enthusiastic response told her the answer to that.

‘You love your work, don't you?' Claudia said as the students went back to their desks and started work again. ‘Not everyone likes to share their knowledge like you do.'

Galíndez looked at her, surprised. Knowledge was the only thing she was willing to share with anyone these days.

‘Where is everybody?' Isabel asked, seeing the empty room.

Galíndez looked up from a desk filled with piles of printouts, the tables and figures circled and annotated in red ink. ‘There's a compulsory lecture for the statistics students this afternoon,' she said. ‘And Claudia went home, she felt ill.'

‘No wonder, after the amount she drank last night.' Isabel smiled. ‘She'll sleep it off, that's one of the great things about being young.'

‘If you say so.' Galíndez's fingers rattled on the keyboard and the printer stuttered into life, spilling new sheets of graphs and tables across the desk.

Isabel came nearer. ‘Looks like you've been busy.'

‘So have you, I hear,' Galíndez said, without looking up.

‘Are you still mad at me, Ana?'

‘Since you ask, I don't think much of your behaviour,' Galíndez said. ‘It was inappropriate.'

‘I put my arm round you. No one died. Can't we move on?'

Galíndez finally looked up. ‘I'm talking about you taking Claudia out, getting her drunk and then spending the night with her. She's a student. That's the sort of thing Luisa would do.'

‘Claudia spent the night at my place because she was blind drunk.' Isabel laughed. ‘I told her to slow down but you know what? She's twenty-two. That's what people do when they're at university. She gave Galíndez a long look. ‘Normally.'

Galíndez looked down at her screen. ‘Even so.'

‘What?' Isabel sighed, exasperated. ‘I phoned her boyfriend this morning and he came over to pick her up.'

‘Boyfriend?' Galíndez saved her file. ‘You shouldn't have let her drink so much.'

‘
Por Dios
, she's young. Didn't you ever get wasted when you were at uni?'

‘Not really.' She frowned. ‘Once or twice.' She saw Isabel's look. ‘A few times, maybe.'

‘Feel free to apologise.' Isabel pulled up a chair. ‘I think you're jealous because I went out and had a good time while you were home poring over trichotomous outcomes.'

‘Dichotomous actually,' Galíndez muttered.

‘Come on, loosen up, Ana,' Isabel said. ‘This investigation is depressing enough without us being miserable. You're usually happy when you're knee-deep in figures.'

‘Someone's got to do it.' Galíndez gave her a reluctant smile. ‘But you're right about not letting it get us down.' She pointed to one the papers on her desk, a set of tables, surrounded by scrawled notes in red ink and flurries of exclamation marks. ‘We've got all the letters coded now, it's starting to get exciting.'

‘Exciting?' Isabel looked dubiously at the printouts. ‘You'd better explain it to me. Though without the numbers.' She noticed something lurking under one of Galíndez's printouts. ‘And if you're leaving that sandwich, I'll have it.'

Galíndez retrieved the plate from under her papers and pushed it across the desk.

‘So, what is it you've been doing?' Isabel asked.

‘Logistic regression.' Galíndez pointed to the printout. ‘It identifies items of data that predict a particular outcome like yes or no, buy or don't buy, that kind of thing. In our data the outcome is whether or not parents who made a complaint about their child's death were killed after the letter was sent.'

Isabel's eyes widened. ‘Strangely, Ana, I understood that. Keep it at that level.'

Galíndez leaned forward, using her pen to point to the figures in the table. ‘Out of all the factors we've got in our database, six things most accurately predict the subsequent death of the parents. The likelihood of getting these results by chance is about one in a hundred thousand. Since it's highly unlikely they occurred randomly, we can infer there's a relationship between the type of clinic and the death of the parents.'

Factors in Letters Increasing the Likelihood of Parental Death

‘Which is good, right?'

‘It suggests the deaths weren't random,' Galíndez agreed. ‘It's not conclusive proof.'

‘And what does that thing, the Odds Ratio mean?'

‘It's an indication of how much a particular factor affects the likelihood of the outcome,' said Galíndez. ‘If the Odds Ratio is one, there's no change in outcome. If it's less than one, the likelihood of the outcome is reduced and an Odds Ratio greater than one indicates an increase in the likelihood of the outcome.'

Galíndez saw Isabel's dazed expression. ‘OK, look at the column on the far right. It shows the percentage change in the likelihood of parental death. See what I mean? If someone's baby was stolen in a private clinic, the odds of them being killed goes up by a hundred per cent; in a clinic run by the Church, the odds are increased by eighty per cent. Parents who threatened to complain to the media also had a forty-seven per cent increased likelihood of dying and those who complained to the police or
guardia civil
increased their chances of death by thirty-six per cent. Lastly, working-class parents had a twenty-five per cent greater increase in the odds of the parents dying.'

‘
Jesús Cristo
,
'
Isabel muttered. ‘You can explain all that from a set of numbers?'

‘It's not proof, but it shows we should focus our investigation on private clinics.'

Isabel peered at the screen. ‘So why are single mothers more likely to be killed?'

Galíndez shrugged. ‘It's just conjecture, but I'd say because it's because they'd be more vulnerable and easier to get at.'

‘Can we use these to get the people running the clinics arrested?'

‘It will take too long,' Galíndez said. ‘We have to make the case to the prosecutor. Then we'd have to obtain warrants to examine their records.' She chewed her lip. ‘Rosario Calderón wants our findings before the election.'

‘But that's only a few weeks away,' said Isabel. ‘We can't check out all the clinics and hospitals in Madrid in that time.'

‘We won't need to. Calderón wants something to illustrate what happened. As long as we can present clear-cut evidence about our findings, she'll have to set up an inquiry or send in the police. Then she'll get her wish – it will make her look good.'