Blood and guts in NO SCHOOL

Crime fic­tion – which is en­joy­ing a huge boom dur­ing the pan­demic - has never meant much to me, per­haps be­cause I’ve spent around 45 years re­search­ing the Holo­caust and other 20th cen­tury geno­cides. When you read about just under two mil­lion peo­ple - in­clud­ing women, chil­dren and the el­derly - being forced to dig their own graves be­fore being shot in the back of the head by squads of peo­ple who were as nor­mal as apple strudel be­fore they put on a uni­form; once you’ve dis­cov­ered the lo­gis­tic de­tails of how the Ger­mans’ six death camps be­tween them gassed 3.1 mil­lion peo­ple (a low es­ti­mate) and you’ve learnt about the hun­dreds of thou­sands of ad­di­tional deaths in labour camps, tran­sit camps and death marches, well, the fact that Colonel Mus­tard (or who­ever) has been bumped off with a can­dle­stick (or what­ever) in the bil­liard room (or wher­ever) makes the close ob­ser­va­tion of the grad­ual des­ic­ca­tion of wet paint seem like an in­vig­o­rat­ing pas­time. Which is why the only two noir writ­ers I’ve en­joyed read­ing tend to stretch the lim­its of the genre until it be­comes some­thing else: the Cata­lan Teresa Solana, who turns it into com­edy; and James Ell­roy, who turns it into a styl­is­tic tour de force. But then I dis­cov­ered a true crime TV se­ries here in Cat­alo­nia called ’Crims’. (De­clared in­ter­est: my son had a job on its post-pro­duc­tion team). The brain­child of a gifted crime re­porter called Car­les Porta, ’Crims’ of­fers its view­ers a highly ad­dic­tive ac­count of sev­eral mur­ders that have taken place in Cat­alo­nia in re­cent years, using in­ter­views with po­lice, pros­e­cu­tors, lawyers and jour­nal­ists; CCTV and news footage; cur­rent im­ages of the scenes of the crimes and the odd grue­some photo of the vic­tims (though not as half as grue­some as the ones that weren’t shown).

And what crimes! For ex­am­ple: a young cou­ple that mur­ders an­other young cou­ple they are shar­ing a house with (near Montser­rat) then stuffs the bod­ies in a freezer and flees to France, the odd thing being that the male mem­bers of each cou­ple were broth­ers: the par­ents now have one son mur­dered and an­other in jail for mur­der­ing him. Or the case of the busi­ness­man who is gunned down out­side his home in Barcelona for no ap­par­ent rea­son (it turns out that an em­ployee who sus­pected he might lose his job hired a hit man). Or the spine-chill­ing case of the psy­chol­o­gist Anna Per­manyer, who went to see some­one who said she wanted to buy a flat from her; the last any­one saw of her was when she stepped into a lift in the block of flats where the buyer lived, and then van­ished from the face of the earth...until her body was found wrapped in cloth and plas­tic, weeks later, in open coun­try­side near Sit­ges...

The one con­stant in these cases is the ab­sence of any re­morse what­so­ever on the part of the per­pe­tra­tors. When filmed in court, all of them acted as calmly as if they were wait­ing for a bus (Anna Per­manyer’s mur­derer even joked to cam­era­men as she en­tered the cour­t­house that they shouldn’t film her be­cause she wasn’t wear­ing any make-up). Ac­cord­ing to the Eng­lish be­hav­ioural psy­chol­o­gist Daniel Net­tle in his now clas­sic study (’Per­son­al­ity’, 2007), ap­prox­i­mately one in every 1,600 peo­ple are psy­chopaths. This doesn’t mean that they’re all reach­ing for the near­est blunt in­stru­ment as you read, merely that they might do if cir­cum­stances pro­vided both a mo­tive and an op­por­tu­nity. The woman who mur­dered Anna Per­manyer, Carme Badia, was sen­tenced to 23 years in 2007 (she’d also been ac­cused of mur­der­ing her hus­band in 1997, for which she spent only a few months in jail be­fore being re­leased for lack of ev­i­dence). At the lat­est, she will be out in 2030.

This just so hap­pens – and please for­give the ap­par­ent change of sub­ject – to be the same year that Carme For­cadell will be re­leased after hav­ing spent 11 and a half years in jail for hav­ing al­lowed a vote on in­de­pen­dence as Speaker for the Cata­lan par­lia­ment in 2017. Jordi Cuixart, the pres­i­dent of a cul­tural as­so­ci­a­tion and pro-in­de­pen­dence ac­tivist, will be out a cou­ple of years ear­lier, after a nine-year spell be­hind bars for stand­ing on top of a po­lice car to tell 40,000 angry pro-indy demon­stra­tors to go home. Oriol Jun­queras, the for­mer vice-pres­i­dent of Cat­alo­nia, will be out a cou­ple of years later, for hav­ing or­gan­ised a peace­ful ref­er­en­dum that 80% of the Cata­lan pop­u­la­tion wanted. And so on: a re­minder that patho­log­i­cal re­morse­less­ness can on oc­ca­sion and at least in Spain, wear ju­di­cial robes.