The Silent and the Damned
Robert Wilson

Dedication

For Jane and José and Mick

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Rafael [blinking in the dark]

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Coda

About the Author

Also by Robert Wilson

Copyright

About the Publisher

Epigraph

Ha, ha! what a fool Honesty is! and Trust his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman!

SHAKESPEARE, The Winter’s Tale

Fear is the foundation of most governments.

JOHN ADAMS, second President of the United States

RAFAEL
[blinking in the dark]

I am frightened? I have no physical reason for fear lying here in bed, next to Lucía, with my little Mario yipping in his sleep next door. But I am scared. My dreams have scared me, except they are not dreams any more. They are more alive than that. The dreams are of faces, just faces. I don’t think I know them and yet I have strange moments when I’m on the brink of recognizing them but it’s as if they don’t want that right now. That’s when I wake up because…I am not being accurate again. They are not exactly faces. They are not flesh. They are more ghostly than real but they do have features. They have colour, but it is not solid. They just miss being human. That’s it. They just miss being human. Is that a clue?

If I am frightened by these faces I should be reluctant to go to bed, but sometimes I look forward to sleep and I realize it’s because I want to know the answer. There’s a key somewhere in my mind, which will unlock the door and tell me: why these faces? Why not any others? What is it about them that my mind has marked out? I have begun to see them quite clearly now, during the day, when my conscious mind is adrift in some way. My subconscious moulds these faces on to living people, so I see the phantom faces animated for a moment, until the real people reassert themselves. They leave me feeling foolish and shaken, like an old man with names on the tip of my tongue but unable to articulate.

I am shivering. That’s what my mind can do to me. I’m cracking up. I’ve been sleepwalking. Lucía told me when I was in the shower. She said I went down to my study at three in the morning. Later that day I found a blank pad on the desk. I saw the indent of some handwriting. I couldn’t find the original. I took it to the window and saw that it was something I had written: ‘the thin air…’?

1

Wednesday, 24th July 2002

‘I want my mummy. I want my mummy.’

Consuelo Jiménez opened her eyes to a child’s face only centimetres from her own, which lay half buried in the pillow. Her eyelashes scratched the cotton slip. The child’s fingers grabbed at the flesh of her upper arm.

‘I want my mummy.’

‘All right, Mario. Let’s go and find Mummy,’ she said, thinking this is too early for anybody. ‘You know she’s only just across the street, don’t you? You can stay here with Matías, have some breakfast, play a little…’

‘I want my mummy.’

The child’s fingers dug into her arm with some urgency and she stroked his hair and kissed him on the forehead.

She didn’t want to cross the street in her night-clothes, like some working-class woman needing something from the shops, but the child was tugging at her, wheedling. She slipped on a white silk dressing gown over her cotton pyjamas and fitted her feet into some gold sandals. She ran her hands through her hair while Mario sheafed her dressing gown and started hauling her away like some stevedore down at the docks.

Taking his hand she led him down the stairs one at a time. They left the chill of the air-conditioned house and the heat, even this early in the morning, was solid and unwavering with not even a lick of freshness from the dawn after another oppressive night. She crossed the empty street. Palm trees hung limp and frazzled as if sleep had not come easily to this neighbourhood. The only sound out on the tarmac came from the air conditioner’s fans blowing more hot, unwanted air into the suffocating atmosphere of the exclusive neighbourhood of Santa Clara on the outskirts of Seville.

Water dripped from a split unit on a high balcony of the Vegas’ house as she half dragged Mario, who’d become suddenly cumbersome and difficult as if he’d changed his mind about his mummy. The drips clattered on the leaves of the abundant vegetation, the sound thick as blood in the hideous heat. Sweat beaded on Consuelo’s forehead. She felt nauseous at the thought of the rest of the day, the heat building on weeks of torrid weather. She keyed in the code number on the pad by the outer gate and stepped into the driveway. Mario ran to the house and pushed against the front door bumping his head against the woodwork. She rang the doorbell, whose electronic chime sounded like a distant cathedral bell in the silent, double-glazed house. No answer. A trickle of sweat found its way between her breasts. Mario pounded the door with his small fist, which made the sound of a dull ache, persistent as chronic grief.

It was just after eight in the morning. She licked at the sweat forming on her top lip.

The maid arrived at the gate. She had no keys. Sra Vega was normally awake early, she said. They heard the gardener, an Ukrainian called Sergei, digging at the side of the house. They startled him and he gripped his mattock like a weapon until he saw the two women. Sweat careened down his pectorals and the ridges of muscle on his naked torso to his shorts. He had been working since 6 a.m. and had heard nothing. As far as he knew the car was still in the garage.

Consuelo left Mario with the maid and took Sergei to the back of the house. He climbed up on to the verandah outside the sitting room and peered through the sliding doors and blinds. The doors were locked. He climbed over the railing of the verandah and leaned across to look in the kitchen window, which was raised above the garden. His head started back with shock.

‘What is it?’ asked Consuelo.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Sr Vega lying on the floor. He not moving.’

Consuelo took the maid and Mario back across the street to her house. The child knew that things were not right and started to cry. The maid could not console him and he fought his way out of her arms. Consuelo made the call. Zero–Nine–One. She lit a cigarette and tried to concentrate while she looked at the helpless maid hovering over the child, who’d thrown a tantrum and was now a writhing, thrashing animal on the floor, howling himself to silence. Consuelo reported the incident to the telephone centre at the Jefatura, gave her name, address and contact number. She slammed the phone down and went to the child, took his kicks and thumps and pulled him to her, held him against her and whispered his name over and over in his ear until he went limp.

She put him in her bed upstairs, got dressed and called the maid to come and keep an eye on him. Mario slept. Consuelo looked at him intently as she brushed her hair. The maid sat on the corner of the bed, unhappy at being caught up in somebody else’s tragedy, knowing that it would infect her own life.

A patrol car pulled up in the street outside the Vegas’ house. Consuelo went out to meet the policeman and took him to the back of the house where he climbed up on to the verandah. He asked her where the gardener had gone. She walked down the lawn to a small building at the bottom where Sergei had his quarters. He wasn’t there. She went back to the house. The policeman hammered on the kitchen window and then radioed information back to the Jefatura. He climbed down from the verandah.

‘Do you know where Sra Vega is?’ he asked.

‘She should be in there. That’s where she was last night when I called her to tell her that her son would stay the night with my boys,’ said Consuelo. ‘Why were you knocking on the window?’

‘No sense in smashing the door down if he’s just drunk and fallen asleep on the floor.’

‘Drunk?’

‘There’s a bottle on the floor next to his body.’

‘I’ve known him for years and I’ve never seen him incapable…never.’

‘Maybe he’s different when he’s on his own.’

‘So what have you done about it?’ said Consuelo, the testy Madrileña trying to keep her shrillness down in front of the more relaxed style of the local policeman.

‘An ambulance was dispatched as soon as you made your call and now the Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homicidios has been notified.’

‘One moment he’s drunk and the next he’s been murdered.’

‘There’s a body lying on the floor,’ said the patrolman, annoyed with her now. ‘He’s not moving and he’s not responding to noise. I have –’

‘Don’t you think you should try and get in there and see if he’s still alive? He’s not moving or responding but he might still be breathing.’

Indecision flitted across the patrolman’s face. He was saved by the arrival of the ambulance. Between them the paramedics and the patrolman found that the house was completely sealed back and front. More cars arrived outside the front of the house.

Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón had finished his breakfast and was sitting in his study in the centre of his enormous, inherited eighteenth-century house in Seville’s old city. He was finishing his coffee and looking at the manual to a digital camera he’d bought a week ago. The glass door of the study opened on to the patio. The thick walls and traditional design of the house meant that air conditioning was rarely needed. Water trickled in the marble fountain without distracting him. His powers of concentration had come back to him after a turbulent year in his personal life. His mobile vibrated on the desk. He sighed as he answered it. This was the time for dead bodies to be discovered. He walked out into the cloister around the patio and leant against one the pillars supporting the gallery above. He listened to the blunt facts stripped of any tragedy and went back into his study. He wrote down an address – Santa Clara – it didn’t sound like a place where anything bad could happen.

He put the mobile in the pocket of his chinos, picked up his car keys and went to open up the colossal wooden doors to his house. He drove his Seat out between the orange trees flanking the entrance and went back to close the doors.

The air conditioning blasted into his chest. He set off down the narrow cobbled streets and broke out into the Plaza del Museo de Bellas Artes with its high trees surrounded by white and ochre façades and the terracotta brick of the museum. He came out of the old city heading for the river and cut right on to Avenida del Torneo. The vague outlines of Calatrava’s ‘Harp’ bridge were visible in the distance through the morning’s haze. He swung away from it and into the new city, grinding through the streets and buildings around the Santa Justa station. He headed out past the endless high-rise blocks of the Avenida de Kansas City thinking about the exclusive barrio where he was heading.

The Garden City of Santa Clara had been planned by the Americans to quarter their officers after the Strategic Air Command base was established near Seville, following Franco’s signing of the Defense Pact of 1953. Some of the bungalows retained their 1950s aspect, others had been Hispanicized and a few, owned by the wealthy, had been torn down and rebuilt from scratch into palatial mansions. As far as Falcón remembered none of these changes had quite managed to rid the area of a pervasive unreality. It was to do with the houses being on their individual plots of land, together but isolated, which was not a Spanish phenomenon but rather like a suburban American estate. It was also, unlike the rest of Seville, almost eerily quiet.

Falcón parked in the shade of some overhanging greenery outside the modern house on Calle Frey Francisco de Pareja. Despite the terracotta brick façade and some ornate touches, it had the solidity of a fortress. He forced his foot not to falter at the first man he saw as he walked through the gate: Juez de Guardia Esteban Calderón, the duty judge. He hadn’t worked with Calderón for over a year but that history was still fresh. They shook hands, clapped each other on the shoulder. He was astonished to find that the woman standing next to the judge was Consuelo Jiménez, who was a part of that same history. She was different from the middle-class woman he’d met the year before when he’d investigated her husband’s murder. Her hair was now loose and with a more modern cut and she wore less make-up and jewellery. He couldn’t understand what she was doing here.

The paramedics went back to their ambulance and pulled out a stretcher on a trolley. Falcón shook hands with the Médico Forense and the judge’s secretary while Calderón asked the patrolman if there was any evidence of breaking and entering. The patrolman gave his report.

Consuelo Jiménez was fascinated by the new Javier Falcón. The Inspector Jefe was not wearing his trademark suit. He wore chinos and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to just below the elbows. He looked younger with his grey hair cut very short, a uniform length all over. Perhaps it was his seasonal style but she didn’t think so. Falcón was feeling the weight of her interest. He disguised his unease by introducing another of his officers, Sub-Inspector Pérez. There was a moment of nervous confusion in which Pérez moved off.

‘You’re wondering what I’m doing here,’ she said. ‘I live across the street. I discovered the…I was with the gardener when he discovered Sr Vega lying on the kitchen floor.’

‘But I thought you bought a house in Heliopolis?’

‘Well, technically, it was Raúl who bought the house in Heliopolis…before he died,’ she said. ‘He wanted to be near his beloved Bétis stadium and I have no interest in football.’

‘And how long have you been living here?’

‘Nearly a year.’

‘And you discovered the body.’

‘The gardener did, and we don’t know that he’s dead yet.’

‘Does anybody keep a spare set of keys?’

‘I doubt it,’ she said.

‘I’d better take a look at the body,’ said Falcón.

Sr Vega was lying on his back. His dressing gown and pyjamas had come off his shoulders and were constricting his arms. His chest was bare and there seemed to be abrasions on the pectorals and abdomen. He had scratch marks at his throat. The man’s face was pale and looked hard, the lips were grey and yellowish.

Falcón went back to Juez Calderón and the Médico Forense.

‘He looks dead to me, but perhaps you’d like to take a look before we break down one of the doors,’ he said. ‘Do we know where his wife is?’

Consuelo explained the situation again.

‘I think we have to go in,’ said Falcón.

‘You might have a job on your hands,’ said Sra Jiménez. ‘Lucía had new windows put in before last winter. They’re double glazed with bulletproof glass. And that front door, if it’s properly locked, you’d be better off going through solid wall.’

‘You know this house?’

A woman appeared in the driveway. She was difficult to miss because she had red hair, green eyes and skin so white it was painful to look at in the brutality of the sunlight.

‘Hola, Consuelo,’ she said, homing in on her amongst all the official faces.

‘Hola, Maddy,’ said Consuelo, who introduced her to everybody as Madeleine Krugman, Sra Vega’s next-door neighbour.

‘Is there something wrong with Lucía or Rafael? I saw the ambulance. Can I do anything?’

All eyes were on Madeleine Krugman, and not just because she spoke Spanish with an American accent. She was tall and slender with a full bust, an unstarved bottom and the innate ability to give dull men extravagant imaginations. Only Falcón and Calderón had sufficient testosterone control to be able to look her in the eye, and that required concentration. Consuelo’s nostrils flared with irritation.

‘We need to get into this house very urgently, Sra Krugman,’ said Calderón. ‘Do you have a set of keys?’

‘I don’t, but…what’s the matter with Rafael and Lucía?’

‘Rafael’s lying on the kitchen floor not moving,’ said Consuelo. ‘We don’t know about Lucía.’

Madeleine Krugman’s short intake of breath revealed a straight line of white teeth broken only by two sharp incisors. For a fraction of a second the invisible plates in the lithosphere of her face seemed to spasm.

‘I have the telephone number of his lawyer. He gave it to me in case there was a problem with the house while they were on holiday,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to go back home…’

She backed away and then turned to the gate. All eyes fastened on to her rump, which shivered slightly under the white linen of her flared trousers. A thin red belt like a line of blood encircled her waist. She disappeared behind the wall. Male noises, which had been suspended under the bell jar of her glamour, resumed.

‘She’s very beautiful, isn’t she?’ said Consuelo Jiménez, annoyed at her own need to draw attention back to herself.

‘Yes,’ said Falcón, ‘and quite different to the beauty we’re accustomed to around here. White. Translucent.’

‘Yes,’ said Consuelo, ‘she’s very white.’

‘Do we know where the gardener is?’ he asked.

‘He’s disappeared.’

‘What do we know about him?’

‘His name is Sergei,’ she said. ‘He’s Russian or Ukrainian. We share him. The Vegas, the Krugmans, Pablo Ortega and me.’

‘Pablo Ortega…the actor?’ asked Calderón.

‘Yes, he’s just moved here,’ she said. ‘He’s not very happy.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me.’

‘Of course, it was you, wasn’t it, Juez Calderón, who put his son in jail for twelve years?’ said Consuelo. ‘Terrible case that, terrible. But I didn’t mean that when I said…although I’m sure that’s a contributing factor. There’s a problem with his house and he finds the area a bit…dead after living in the centre of town.’

‘Why did he move?’ asked Falcón.

‘Nobody in the barrio would talk to him any more.’

‘Because of what his son did?’ said Falcón. ‘I don’t remember this case…’

‘Ortega’s son kidnapped an eight-year-old boy,’ said Calderón. ‘He tied him up and abused him over several days.’

‘But didn’t kill him?’ asked Falcón.

‘The boy escaped,’ said Calderón.

‘In fact it was stranger than that,’ said Consuelo. ‘Ortega’s son released him and then sat on the bed in the soundproofed room he’d prepared for the kidnap and waited for the police to arrive. He was lucky they got to him first.’

‘They say he’s having a hard time of it in prison,’ said Calderón.

‘I can’t find any pity for people who destroy the innocence of children,’ said Consuelo, savagely. ‘They deserve everything they get.’

Madeleine Krugman returned with the telephone number. She was now wearing sunglasses as if protecting herself from her own painful whiteness.

‘No name?’ said Falcón, punching the number into his mobile.

‘My husband says his name is Carlos Vázquez.’

‘And where’s your husband?’

‘At home.’

‘When did Sr Vega give you this number?’

‘Before he went to join Lucía and Mario on holiday last summer.’

‘Is Mario the child who slept at your house last night, Sra Jiménez?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do the Vegas have any family in the Seville area?’

‘Lucía’s parents.’

Falcón broke away from the group and asked to speak to the lawyer.

‘I am Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón,’ he said. ‘Your client, Sr Rafael Vega, is lying on his kitchen floor incapacitated, possibly dead. We need to get into his house.’

A long silence while Vázquez digested this devastating news.

‘I’ll be there in ten minutes,’ he said. ‘I advise you not to try to break in, Inspector Jefe, because it will certainly take you much longer.’

Falcón looked up at the impregnable house. There were two security cameras on the corners. He found two more at the back of the building.

‘It seems the Vegas were very security conscious,’ he said, rejoining the group. ‘Cameras. Bulletproof windows. Solid front door.’

‘He’s a wealthy man,’ said Consuelo.

‘And Lucía is…well, neurotic to say the least,’ said Maddy Krugman.

‘Did you know Sr Vega before you moved here, Sra Jiménez?’ asked Falcón.

‘Of course. He told me that the house I eventually bought was going to come up for sale before it appeared on the market.’

‘Were you friends or business associates?’

‘Both.’

‘What’s his business?’

‘Construction,’ said Madeleine. ‘That’s why the house is built like a fort.’

‘He’s a client of mine at the restaurant in El Porvenir,’ said Consuelo. ‘But I also knew him through Raúl. They were in the same business, as you know. They joined forces once on some developments in Triana years ago.’

‘Did you know him just as a neighbour, Sra Krugman?’

‘My husband is an architect. He’s working on some projects for Sr Vega.’

A large silver Mercedes pulled up outside the house. A short, stocky man in a white long-sleeve shirt, dark tie and grey trousers got out. He introduced himself as Carlos Vázquez and ran his fingers through his prematurely white hair. He handed the keys to Falcón, who opened the door with a single turn. It had not been double locked.

The house seemed bleak and freezing after the heat of the street. Falcón asked Juez Calderón if he and the forensics could take a quick look before the Médico Forense started his work. He took Felipe and Jorge to the edge of the tiled floor of the kitchen. They looked, nodded to each other and backed away. Calderón had to prevent Carlos Vázquez from entering the kitchen and contaminating the crime scene. The lawyer didn’t look as if he was used to having a hand placed on his chest by anybody but his wife in bed. The Médico Forense, already gloved, was ushered in. While he checked for a pulse and took the temperature of the body Falcón went outside and asked Consuelo and Madeleine if they would be available for interviews later. He made a note that Consuelo was still taking care of Vega’s son, Mario.

The Médico Forense murmured into his dictaphone as he checked the ears, nose, eyes and mouth of the victim. He took a pair of tweezers and turned over the plastic bottle which lay close to the body’s outstretched hand. It was a litre of drain cleaner.

Falcón backed away down the corridor and checked the downstairs rooms. The dining room was ultra modern. The table was a thick single sheet of opaque green glass mounted on two stainless steel arches. It was fully laid for ten people. The chairs were white, the floor was white, the walls and light fixtures were also white. In the chill of the air conditioning the dining experience must have been like the inside of a fridge, without the clutter of butter trays and old food. It did not seem to Falcón that any entertaining had ever taken place in this room.

The living room by comparison was like the inside of a confused person’s head. Every surface was covered in bric-a-brac – souvenirs from around the world. Falcón saw holidays in which Vega obsessively filmed with the latest technology while his wife devastated the tourist shops. On the mid section of the sofa was a cordless phone, a box of chocolates with half a tray uneaten and three remotes for satellite, DVD and video. On the floor was a pair of pink fluffy slippers. The lights were off, as was the television.

Each of the stairs up to the bedrooms was made out of a slab of absolute black granite. He checked the glass-smooth surfaces as he moved slowly upwards. Nothing. The floor at the top of the stairs was made of black granite inlaid with diamonds of white marble. He was drawn to the door of the master bedroom. The double bed was occupied. A pillow lay over the face of the occupant whose arms lay outside the light duvet on the bed. There was a slim band of a wristwatch on an arm flung out as if reaching for help. A single visible foot had bright-red toenails. He went to the bedside and checked for a pulse while looking down on the two depressions in the pillow. Lucía Vega was dead, too.

There were three other rooms upstairs, all with bathrooms. One was empty, another had a double bed and the last belonged to Mario. The ceiling of the boy’s room was painted with a night sky. An old, one-armed teddy bear lay face up on the bed.

Falcón reported the second dead body to Juez Calderón. The Médico Forense was kneeling by Sr Vega’s side and working at prising his fingers apart.

‘There seems to be a note in Sr Vega’s right hand,’ said Calderón. ‘The body’s cooled down quickly in the air con and I want him to get it out without tearing it. Any first thoughts, Inspector Jefe?’

‘On the face of it, it looks like a suicide pact. He’s smothered his wife and then drunk some drain cleaner, although that’s a nasty, lingering way to kill yourself.’

‘Pact? What makes you think there was an agreement?’

‘I’m just saying that’s what it looks like,’ said Falcón. ‘The fact that the little boy was left out of it might indicate some collusion. A mother wouldn’t be able to bear the thought of the death of her own child.’

‘And a father could?’

‘It depends on the pressure. If there’s the possibility of financial or moral disgrace he might not want his male child to see that or live with the knowledge of it. He would see killing him as a favour. Men have killed their entire families because they think they have failed them and that it’s better nobody survives bearing their name and its shame.’

‘But you have your doubts?’ said Calderón.

‘Suicide, whether it’s a pact or not, is rarely a spontaneous thing and there are some spontaneous elements to this crime scene. First, the door was not securely locked. Consuelo Jiménez had called to say that Mario had fallen asleep so they were sure he wasn’t going to return, but they didn’t double lock the door.’

‘The door was shut, that was enough.’

‘If you’re about to do something unnatural you would put yourself behind locked doors to make absolutely certain there was no possibility of interruption. It’s a psychological necessity. Serious suicides normally take full precautions.’

‘What else?’

‘The way everything has just been left here: the phone, the chocolates, the slippers. There seems to be a lack of premeditation.’

‘Well, certainly on her part,’ said Calderón.

‘That is a point, of course,’ said Falcón.

‘Drain cleaner?’ said Calderón. ‘Why would you take drain cleaner?’

‘We may find there was something stronger than drain cleaner in the bottle,’ said Falcón. ‘The reason? Well, he could be meting out punishment to himself…you know, cleaning himself of all his sins. There’s also the advantage of it being noiseless and, depending on what else he’s taken, irrevocable, too.’

‘Well, that does sound premeditated, Inspector Jefe. So there are both spontaneous and planned elements to these deaths.’

‘All right…if they were lying on the bed together holding hands, dead, with a note pinned to his pyjamas then I’d be happy to treat it as suicide. As it stands, I would prefer to investigate the deaths as murder before deciding.’

‘Perhaps the note in his hand will…’ said Calderón. ‘But strange to get dressed for bed before you…or is that another psychological necessity? Getting ready for the biggest sleep of all.’

‘Let’s hope he was the sort who left his security cameras on and the recorders loaded with tapes,’ said Falcón, returning to the pragmatic. ‘We should have a look in his study.’

They crossed the entrance hall and went down a corridor by the stairs. Vega’s study was on the right with a view of the street. There was a leather chair tilted back behind a desk, with a framed poster of this year’s bullfights held during the Feria de Abril hanging on the wall.

The desk was a large, empty, light-coloured piece of wood with a laptop and a telephone. Three drawers on castors sat underneath. Behind the door were four black filing cabinets and at the end of the room the recording equipment for the security cameras. There were no LEDs and the plugs were out of the wall sockets. Each recorder had an unused tape inside.

‘This doesn’t look good,’ said Falcón.

The filing cabinets were all locked. He pulled at the mobile set of drawers under the desk. Locked. He went upstairs to the bedroom and found a walk-in closet, with his suits and shirts to the right and her dresses and a vast number of shoes (some worryingly similar) to the left. A tall set of drawers had a wallet, set of keys and some change on top.

One of the keys opened the drawers under the desk. There was nothing unusual in the top two, but as he pulled on the third drawer something at the back butted up against the ream of paper at the front. It was a handgun.

‘I haven’t seen many of these,’ said Falcón. ‘This is a Heckler & Koch 9 mm. You own one of these if you’re expecting trouble.’

‘If you had one of those,’ said Calderón, ‘would you drink a litre of drain cleaner or blow your brains out?’

‘Given the choice…’ said Falcón.

The lawyer appeared in the doorway, his dark brown eyes set hard in his head.

‘You have no right –’ he started.

‘This is a murder investigation, Sr Vázquez,’ said Falcón. ‘Sra Vega is upstairs on the bed, she’s been suffocated with a pillow. Any idea why your client should have one of these in his study?’

Vázquez blinked at the gun.

‘Seville is one of those curious cities where the wealthy and privileged people of Santa Clara are separated from the drug-ridden disadvantaged ones of the Polígono San Pablo by a small barrio, the paper factory and the Calle de Tesalónica. I imagine he had it for his own protection.’

‘Like the security cameras he didn’t bother to switch on?’ said Falcón.

Vázquez looked at the inert recorders. His mobile went off playing the first few bars of Carmen. The lawmen grinned at each other. Vázquez went down the hall. Calderón closed the door and Falcón knew what he’d suspected as he’d shaken the Juez’s hand that morning – there was news and it was relevant to him.

‘I wanted you to hear this from me,’ said Calderón, ‘and not the rumour machine in the Jefatura or the Edificio de los Juzgados.’

Falcón nodded, his larynx suddenly paralysed.

‘Inés and I are getting married at the end of the summer,’ said Calderón.

He’d known this was coming but the news still rooted him to the floor. It seemed like minutes before his feet, moving at the pace of a diver’s on the ocean floor, brought him close enough to shake Calderón’s hand. He thought about gripping the judge’s shoulder in comradely fashion but the bitterness of his disappointment filled his mouth with the taint of a bad olive.

‘Congratulations, Esteban,’ he said.

‘We told our families last night,’ said Calderón. ‘You’re the first outsider to know.’

‘You’ll make each other very happy,’ said Falcón. ‘I know.’

They nodded to each other and disengaged.

‘I’ll get back to the Médico Forense,’ said the judge and left the room.

Falcón went to the window, took out his mobile and thumbed up Alicia Aguado’s number from the address book. She was the clinical psychologist he’d been seeing for more than a year. His thumb stroked the call button and a flash of anger helped him to resist pressing it. This could wait until their regular weekly appointment the following evening. They’d covered his ex-wife Inés a million times over and she would just chastise him again for not moving on.

Javier and Inés had settled their differences. It had been a part of the rebuilding process after the Francisco Falcón scandal had broken fifteen months ago. Francisco was the world-famous artist whom Javier had always believed to be his father, but who had been revealed as a fraud, a murderer and not his real father after all. Inés had forgiven Javier even before they’d arranged to meet some months after the media frenzy. It had been his coldness, captured by her terrible rhyming mantra, Tú no tienes corazón, Javier Falcón. ‘You have no heart, Javier Falcón’, that had finished their short marriage. Given his family history it was now clear to her why he should have been deficient in this fundamental human way. Over the last few months of his therapy thoughts of her had subsided, but whenever her name came up there was an unmistakable leap in his stomach. Her terrible accusation still mangled his mind and, in forgiving him she’d become, in his unstable state, someone to whom he had to prove himself.

And now this. Still, Inés had been seeing the judge for nearly a year and a half. They were the new golden couple not just of the Seville legal system, but of Seville society as well. Their marriage was an inevitability, which didn’t made the news any easier to bear.

Vázquez appeared on his shoulder in the reflection of the glass. Falcón switched back into professional mode.

‘How surprised are you to find your client dead under these strange circumstances, Sr Vázquez?’ he asked.

‘Very,’ he said.

‘Where’s the licence for his gun, by the way?’

‘That’s his private affair. This is his house. I’m only his lawyer.’

‘But he entrusted you with the keys to his home.’

‘He has no family here. When they went away for the summer they often took Lucía’s parents, as well. There is someone in my office all the time. It seemed…’

‘What about the Americans next door?’

‘They’ve been here barely a year,’ said Vázquez. ‘He rents that house to them. The husband works for him as an architect. He didn’t like people to get too involved in his life. He gave them my telephone number in case of emergencies.’

‘Is Vega Construcciones his only company?’

‘Let’s say he’s in the property business. He builds and rents out apartments and offices. He constructs industrial property to order. He buys and sells land. He has a number of estate agencies.’

Falcón sat on the edge of the desk, his foot swinging.

‘This gun, Sr Vázquez, is not for discouraging burglars. It’s a gun for stopping a man dead. Even if you clipped a man on the shoulder with a 9 mm bullet from a Heckler & Koch you’d probably kill him.’

‘If you were a rich man who wanted to protect his family and home, would you go out and buy a toy or a serious piece of weaponry?’

‘So, as far as you know, Sr Vega is not involved in anything criminal or borderline illegal.’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘And you can think of no reason why anybody would want to kill him?’

‘Look, Inspector Jefe, I’m involved with the legal aspects of my clients’ businesses. I rarely get involved in their personal lives unless it has an impact on their business. I know about his company. If he was doing anything else then he was not employing me as his lawyer. If he was having an affair with another man’s wife, which I doubt, I wouldn’t have known about it.’

‘So what is your reading of this crime scene, Sr Vázquez? Sra Vega upstairs, suffocated by a pillow. Sr Vega downstairs, dead with a litre of drain cleaner by his side. While their son, Mario, is in the hands of a neighbour for the night.’

Silence. The brown eyes steadied on Falcón’s chest.

‘It looks like suicide.’

‘At least one of those deaths has to be a murder.’

‘It looks like Rafael killed his wife and then himself.’

‘Did you ever see any evidence of that level of instability in your late client?’

‘How’s anybody supposed to know what goes on inside a man’s head?’

‘So, he wasn’t looking at business failure or financial ruin?’

‘You’d have to speak to the accountant about that, although the accountant was not the finance director. His knowledge would probably be confined.’

‘Who was the finance director?’

‘Rafael kept things close to his chest.’

Falcón gave him his notebook. Vázquez wrote down the accountant’s name, Francisco Dourado, and his details.

‘Is there any scandal brewing that you know of, involving Sr Vega or his company?’ asked Falcón.

‘Now I know you,’ said Sr Vázquez, smiling for the first time with astonishingly perfect teeth. ‘Falcón. I didn’t make the connection before. Well…you’re still here, Inspector Jefe, and my client hasn’t gone through anything like you did.’

‘But I didn’t commit any crime, Sr Vázquez. I wasn’t facing moral ruin or personal shame.’

‘Shame,’ said the lawyer. ‘Do you think shame still has that sort of power in our modern world?’

‘It depends on the society in which you have built your life. How important its opinion is to you,’ said Falcón. ‘By the way, do you hold Sr Vega’s will?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Who is the next of kin?’

‘As I said, he has no family.’

‘And his wife?’

‘She has a sister in Madrid. Her parents live here in Seville.’

‘We’ll need someone to identify the bodies.’

Pérez appeared in the doorway.

‘They’ve pulled the note out of Sr Vega’s hand,’ he said.

They went to the kitchen, squeezing past the forensics who were crowding the corridor with their cases, waiting to get on to the crime scene.

The note was already in a plastic evidence bag. Calderón handed it over, eyebrows raised. Falcón and Vázquez frowned as they read it, and not just because its ten words were written in English.

‘…the thin air you breathe from 9/11 until the end…’

2

Wednesday, 24th July 2002

‘Do these words mean anything to you?’ asked Calderón.

‘Nothing at all,’ said Vázquez.

‘Does the handwriting look normal to you?’

‘It’s definitely Sr Vega’s…that’s all I can say.’

‘It doesn’t differ from his usual handwriting in any way?’

‘I’m not an expert, Juez,’ said Vázquez. ‘It doesn’t seem to have been written with a trembling hand, but it is not exactly fluid either. It seems careful rather than dashed off.’

‘It’s not what I would call a suicide note,’ said Falcón.

‘What would you call it, Inspector Jefe?’ asked Vázquez.

‘An enigma. Something that’s demanding to be investigated.’

‘Interesting,’ said Calderón.

‘Is it?’ said Vázquez. ‘We are always given the impression that detective work is very exciting. This…?’

‘If you were a murderer you would normally not want to have your work investigated,’ said Falcón. ‘You would hope to get away with it. You told me earlier that you thought this crime scene looked like a suicide. A killer with a motive would usually try to give that notion authority with a straightforward suicide note and not with something that makes the investigating team think: What’s this all about?’

‘Unless he was a madman,’ said Vázquez. ‘One of those serial killers laying down a challenge.’

‘Well, first of all, there’s no challenge. A half-note in Sr Vega’s handwriting is not what I would call a psychotic attempt to communicate. It’s too oblique. Secondly, the crime scene does not contain any of the qualities we associate with a psychopathic killer. They are the sort of people who think about body placement for instance. They introduce elements of their obsessions into the picture. They show that they have been here, that an intricate mind has been at work. There’s nothing casual about a serial killer’s montage. A bottle of drain cleaner is not left where it fell. Everything has importance.’

‘So what normal person would kill a man and his wife and want to have it investigated?’ asked Vázquez.

‘A murderer who had good reason to hate Sr Vega and wanted him to be revealed for the man he was,’ said Falcón. ‘As you may know, murder inquiries are very intrusive processes. To find the motive we have to conduct a post mortem, not just on the body but on the victim’s life. We have to go into everything – business, social, public, private and as personal as we can get. Perhaps Sr Vega himself…’

‘But, Inspector Jefe, you can never get inside a man’s head, can you?’ said Sr Vázquez.

‘The other possibility is that Sr Vega himself is trying to communicate with us. By balling this note in his fist he may be telling us to investigate the crime.’

‘You didn’t let me finish,’ said Vázquez. ‘The one thing my job has taught me is the three voices of man: the public one to address the world, the private one he keeps for his family and friends, and the most troubling one of all – the voice inside his own head. The one he uses to talk to himself. Successful people like Sr Vega have very powerful inner voices and something I’ve noticed about that kind of person…he never lets anybody have access to it – not his parents, not his wife, not his first-born child.’

‘That’s not the point –’ said Falcón.

‘The point is that we get insights,’ said Calderón, cutting in. ‘A man’s actions, the way he behaves with people…different people, it all tells us something about him.’

‘In my experience, they tell you what he wants you to think,’ said Vázquez. ‘Let me show you something about Sr Vega and you give me your insight. Can we walk across this kitchen floor yet?’

Felipe and Jorge were brought in to check and clear a corridor across the kitchen floor. Falcón gave Vázquez a pair of latex gloves. They crossed the kitchen to a door on the other side which opened on to a room whose three walls were made up of floor-to-ceiling stainless steel fridges. Hanging on the clear wall was an impressive array of knives, choppers and saws. The white tiles of the floor were pristine and gave off the faint smell of a pine detergent. In the middle of the room was a wooden table with a top thirty centimetres thick. Its bleached surface was a crosshatching of cuts and notches with a declivity in the middle, its edge furred from constant use. Falcón felt a strange sense of dread looking at that table.

‘And this is where he keeps the bodies, is it, Sr Vázquez?’ asked Calderón.

‘Look in the fridges and freezers,’ said the lawyer. ‘They’re full of bodies.’

Calderón opened a fridge door. Inside was a half-carcass of beef with hooves removed. The visible meat was a deep, dark red, almost black in parts where it wasn’t pearled with membrane or covered in thick, creamy yellow fat. The fridges on either side contained several lambs and a pink pig. The latter’s head had been removed and hung on a hook, ears stiff, eyes closed with long white lashes making it look at restful sleep. The other doors opened on to freezers with cuts of frozen meat packaged and stored in baskets or just thrown into the dark frosty depths.

‘What do you make of that?’ asked Vázquez.

‘He wasn’t a vegetarian,’ said Calderón.

‘He enjoyed butchering his own meat,’ said Falcón. ‘Where did he get it from?’

‘From specialized farms up in the Sierra de Aracena,’ said Vázquez. ‘He didn’t think there was a single butcher in Seville who had the first idea about handling meat, neither hanging it nor cutting it up.’

‘Does that mean he used to be a butcher?’ asked Falcón. ‘Do you know when and where that was?’

‘All I know is that his father used to be a butcher before he was killed.’

‘Before he was killed? What does that mean? He was murdered or –?’

‘That was the expression he used to describe the death of his parents. “They were killed.” He never offered an explanation and I didn’t ask for one.’

‘How old was Sr Vega?’

‘Fifty-eight years old.’

‘So, born in 1944…five years after the Civil War ended. They didn’t die in wartime,’ said Falcón. ‘You don’t know when they were killed?’

‘Is this relevant, Inspector Jefe?’ asked Vázquez.

‘We’re building a picture of the victim’s life. It would have had a significant effect on Sr Vega’s mental state if, say, they died in a car accident when he was still a boy. If they were murdered, that would be something else altogether. That leaves unanswered questions and, especially if there was no retribution, it could breed a determination, not necessarily to find out why, which could be beyond his capabilities, but to prove something to himself. To find out who he was in this world.’

‘My God, Inspector Jefe, ‘said Vázquez, ‘perhaps it’s your own experience that’s made you so eloquent on the matter but I’m sorry I can’t help you with that kind of information. I’m sure there are records…’

‘How long have you known him?’ asked Calderón.

‘Since 1983.’

‘Was that here…in Seville?’

‘He wanted to buy a plot of land. It was his first project.’

‘And what had he been doing before that?’ asked Falcón. ‘Butchery doesn’t buy you very much land.’

‘I didn’t ask him. He was my first client. I was twenty-eight years old. I didn’t want to do or ask anything that might lose me the work.’

‘So his background didn’t bother you – the possibility that he might rip you off?’ asked Falcón. ‘How did you meet?’

‘He came in off the street one day. You probably don’t know this about business, Inspector Jefe, but you have to take risks. If you want to be sure about everything you don’t set up your own practice…you work for the State.’

‘Did he have an accent?’ asked Falcón, ignoring the slight.

‘He spoke in Andaluz, but it didn’t sound as if he was born to it. He’d been abroad. I know he spoke American English, for instance.’

‘You didn’t question him about any of that?’ asked Falcón. ‘I mean, over lunch or a beer, not in an interrogation room.’

‘Look, Inspector Jefe, I just wanted the man’s business. I didn’t want to marry him.’

The Médico Forense put his head round the door to say he was going upstairs to look at Sra Vega’s body. Calderón went with him.

‘Was Sr Vega married when you first met him?’ asked Falcón.

‘No,’ said Vázquez. ‘There were no divorce proceedings, although I think he produced a death certificate of a previous spouse. You’ll have to ask Lucía’s parents.’

‘When did they marry?’

‘Eight…ten years ago, something like that.’

‘Were you invited?’

‘I was his testigo.’

‘A trusted man in every respect,’ said Falcón.

‘What do you make of my client’s hobby?’ asked Vázquez, wanting to take back control of the interview.

‘His parents “were killed”. His father was a butcher,’ said Falcón. ‘Perhaps this is his way of keeping a memory alive.’

‘I don’t think he liked his father that much.’

‘So he did give you some personal revelations?’

‘Over the last…nearly twenty years I’ve gleaned some small pieces of information. His father being hard on his only son was one of them. A favourite punishment was to make his son work in the cold store in just a shirt. Rafael suffered from arthritis in his shoulders, which he put down to that early treatment.’

‘Perhaps butchery gives him a sense of control. I mean, not just because he’s good at it but because he’s reducing something large and unmanageable down to comprehensible and usable pieces,’ said Falcón. ‘And that’s the work of the constructor. He takes the vast and complex architect’s plans and dismantles them into a series of jobs involving steel, concrete, bricks and mortar.’

‘I think the few people who knew about his hobby found it more…sinister.’

‘The idea of the urbane businessman hacking his way down the spine of a dead beast?’ said Falcón. ‘I suppose, there is a certain brutality to the work.’

‘A lot of people who had dealings with Sr Vega thought they knew him,’ said Vázquez. ‘He understood what made people tick and he had learnt how to charm. He had an instinct for a person’s strengths and weaknesses. He made men feel interesting and powerful, and women, mysterious and beautiful. It was shocking to see how well it worked. I realized some time ago that I didn’t know him…at all. It meant that he trusted me, but only with his business, not with his private thoughts.’

‘You were his testigo, that’s a little more than a business relationship.’

‘You know there was a business element to his relationship with Lucía…or rather Lucía’s family.’

‘They had land?’ asked Falcón.

‘He made them very wealthy people,’ said Vázquez, nodding.

‘And not very inquisitive about his mysterious past?’

‘I only wanted to show you that being his testigo did not imply a more intimate relationship…’

‘Than he had with his wife?’

‘You’ll be talking to Lucía’s parents, I’m sure,’ said Vázquez.

‘How was he with his son, Mario?’

‘He loved his son. The child was very important to him.’

‘It seems odd that he should have waited until he was over fifty before starting a family.’

Silence, while Vázquez riffled through his lawyerly mind.

‘I can’t help you there, Inspector Jefe,’ he said.

‘But I’m making you think.’

‘I mentioned the death certificate. I was just going over other conversations.’

‘You met him when he was nearly forty years old. He had money enough to buy land.’

‘He had to borrow as well.’

‘Still, someone of that generation, with that sort of money, would normally have a family.’

‘You know, he never talked about his life, that part of it before he and I met.’

‘Apart from his father’s butchery business.’

‘And that only came up because of the planning permission needed to build this room when he renovated the house. I saw the drawings. It needed an explanation.’

‘When was that?’

‘Twelve years ago,’ said Vázquez. ‘But I didn’t get the full family history.’

‘He told you how he was punished by his father.’

‘It was just fragments. There was no major discussion.’

Felipe, the older of the two forensics, put his head round the door.

‘Do you want to talk about this now, Inspector Jefe?’

Falcón nodded. Vázquez gave him his card and the house keys and said he’d be in Seville for at least another week before the August holidays. As he turned to leave he told Falcón to open the door on the other side of the butcher’s room. It gave on to the garage, in which there was a brand-new silver Jaguar.

‘He took delivery of that last week, Inspector Jefe,’ said Vázquez. ‘Hasta luego.’

Falcón joined the forensics in the kitchen. Felipe was watching Jorge working his way around the foot of the kitchen units.

‘What have we got?’ asked Falcón.

‘Nothing so far,’ said Felipe. ‘The floor has been recently cleaned.’

‘The work surfaces?’

‘No, there are prints all over those. It’s just the floor,’ said Felipe. ‘You’d have thought with a litre of drain cleaner in his guts he’d have gone into convulsions. You ever had gallstone trouble, Inspector Jefe?’

‘Fortunately not,’ he said, but he caught the glimmer of horror in Felipe’s eye. ‘Don’t they say it’s the closest a male can get to the pain of childbirth?’

‘I told my wife that and she reminded me both her babies were nearly four kilos each and that a gallstone is about nine grammes.’

‘There’s very little sympathy in the pain stakes,’ said Falcón.

‘I thrashed around on the bathroom floor like a lunatic. There should be latent prints everywhere.’

‘Fingerprints on the bottle?’

‘One set, very strong and clear…which is surprising, too. I wouldn’t have thought Sr Vega would buy his own drain cleaner. There should be others.’

‘It must have been doctored with something stronger, or with poison, or he must have taken pills. Conventional drain cleaner would take some time, wouldn’t it?’

‘Strange way to do it, if you ask me,’ said Jorge, from the foot of the kitchen units.

‘Well, I think this points to what we all saw when we first took a look at the crime scene,’ said Falcón.

‘It didn’t look right,’ said Felipe.

‘I thought it was “off”, too,’ said Jorge.

‘Nothing you can put your finger on?’ said Falcón.

‘It’s always the same with these scenes,’ said Felipe. ‘It’s what’s missing that matters. I took one look at the floor and thought: No, I’m getting nothing from that.’

‘Did you hear about the note?’

‘Weird,’ said Jorge. ‘“…the thin air you breathe…” what’s that?’

‘Sounds pure,’ said Falcón.

‘And the 9/11 stuff?’ asked Jorge. ‘We’re a long way from New York.’

‘He was probably bankrolling al-Qaeda,’ said Felipe.

‘Don’t joke about it,’ said Jorge. ‘Anything can happen these days.’

‘All I know is that this is wrong,’ said Felipe. ‘Not so wrong that I’m totally convinced that he was murdered, but wrong enough to make me suspicious.’

‘The position of the bottle?’ asked Falcón.

‘Had it been me, I’d have drunk it and flung it across the room,’ said Jorge. ‘There should be droplets everywhere.’

‘And there aren’t any, except at the point where the bottle lay just over a metre from the body.’

‘But there are some drops?’

‘Yes, they’ve dripped from the neck of the bottle.’

‘Any between the body and the bottle?’

‘No,’ said Felipe, ‘which again is odd, but not…impossible.’

‘Just as he could have thrashed around on the floor wiping away any latents and droplets with his dressing gown?’

‘Ye-e-es,’ said Felipe, unconvinced.

‘Give me some conjecture, Felipe. I know you hate it, but just give me some.’

‘We only deal in facts here,’ said Felipe, ‘because facts are the only things that stand up in court. Right, Inspector Jefe?’

‘Come on, Felipe.’

‘I’ll say it,’ said Jorge, getting to his feet. ‘We all know what’s missing from this crime scene and that is…a person. We’re not sure what they did, or whether they were involved even. We just know that somebody was here.’

‘So we have a phantom,’ said Falcón. ‘Any of you believe in ghosts?’

‘Now they really don’t go down well in a court of law,’ said Felipe.

3

Wednesday, 24th July 2002

Consuelo Jiménez opened the door to Javier Falcón and led him down the corridor to her L-shaped sitting room overlooking a manicured lawn, whose greenness was lurid in the bleaching sunlight. The water in the blue pool, with its necklace of white tiles, trembled against its confinement pushing silky rhomboids towards the garden house, whose walls and roof were blasted by purple bougainvillea.

Falcón stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling sliding doors with his hands clasped behind his back, feeling self-consciously official. Consuelo sat on the sofa dressed in a tight cream silk skirt and a matching blouse. They were tense but oddly comfortable with each other.

‘Do you like bougainvillea?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said, without thinking, ‘it gives me hope.’

‘I’m beginning to find it trite.’

‘Perhaps you see too much of it here in Santa Clara,’ said Falcón. ‘And framed by these windows it looks like a painting that says nothing.’

‘I could have a man endlessly diving naked into the pool and call it my Hockney vivant,’ she said. ‘Can I get you anything? I’ve made some iced tea.’

He nodded and looked at her figure as she went to the kitchen. His blood stirred at the sight of the muscles in her calves. He glanced around the room. There was a single painting on the wall of a large cerise canvas with a dark blue widening stripe diagonally across it. The surfaces of tables and a sideboard contained photographs of her children – individuals and grouped. Apart from a dark blue sofa which turned a right angle with the L-shaped room and an armchair there was little else. He turned back to the facile garden thinking that she’d mentioned Hockney because this barrio, in the incessant sunshine, was much more like California than Andalucía.

Consuelo Jiménez handed him an iced tea and pointed him into the armchair. She lounged on the sofa, nodding her foot at him, her low-heeled sandal hanging from her toes.

‘It doesn’t feel like Spain out here,’ said Falcón.

‘You mean we’re not falling over each other like a basket of puppies.’

‘It’s quiet.’

They sat in silence for a moment – no traffic, no church bells ringing, no whistling, no handclapping down the streets.

‘Double-glazing,’ she said. ‘And I live with noise all the time in the restaurants. I live my Spanish life three times over while I’m there so when I’m out here it’s like…the afterlife. I’d have thought you’d be the same, doing what you do.’

‘I prefer to be in the midst of things these days,’ said Falcón. ‘I’ve done my time in limbo.’

‘I’m sure in that massive house of your father’s you don’t exactly feel in…I mean, not your father…Sorry.’

‘I still refer to Francisco Falcón as my father. It’s a forty-seven-year habit which I haven’t been able to break.’

‘You’ve changed, Inspector Jefe.’

‘Call me Javier.’

‘Your style is different.’

‘I cut my hair. I’ve given up suits. There’s been a relaxation of standards.’

‘You’re not so intense,’ she said.

‘Oh, I am. I’ve just realized that people don’t like it, so I hide it. I’ve learnt to keep smiling.’

‘I had a friend whose mother gave her the advice: “Keep moving, keep smiling.” It works,’ said Consuelo. ‘We live in an age of glibness, Javier. When was the last time you had a serious conversation?’

‘I have them all the time.’

‘With someone other than yourself.’

‘I’ve been seeing a clinical psychologist.’

‘Of course you have, after what you’ve been through,’ she said. ‘But that’s not conversation, is it?’

‘Very little of it,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s like an absurd self-indulgence, other times vomiting.’

She snatched at the cigarettes on the table, lit one up and sank back satisfied.

‘I’m annoyed with you,’ she said, pointing at him with the lit cigarette. ‘You never called me and we were supposed to have dinner…remember?’

‘You moved house.’

‘Does that mean you tried?’

‘I haven’t had much time,’ he said, smiling.

‘Smiling doesn’t work with me,’ she said. ‘I know what it means. You’ll have to learn some new strategies.’

‘Things have been coming to a head,’ he said.

‘In the therapy?’

‘Yes, that, and I have legal problems with my sister Manuela. My half sister.’

‘She’s the acquisitive one, I seem to remember.’

‘You’ve read all the scandal.’

‘You’d have to have been in a coma to avoid it,’ she said. ‘So what does Manuela want?’

‘Money. She wanted me to write a book about my life with Francisco, including all the journals, and my take on the murder case that brought it all to light. Or rather she wanted me to work with her journalist boyfriend, who would ghost the book for me. I refused. She got angry. Now she’s working on proving that I’m not the rightful heir to Francisco Falcón’s house, that I am not his son…You see how it goes.’

‘You have to fight her.’

‘She has very different mental processes. She thinks how Francisco used to think, which was probably why he never liked her,’ said Falcón. ‘She’s a manipulator and a public relations expert which, combined with her energy, ambition and wallet, is lethal.’

‘I’ll buy the dinner.’

‘It’s not that bad. It’s just something that adds to the background pressure of life.’

‘What you need is some foreground pleasure, Javier,’ she said. ‘That brother of yours, the bull breeder, Paco. Is he any help to you?’

‘We get on well. There’s been no change there, but this kind of thing is not his strength. He needs Manuela, too. She’s his vet and one word to the authorities about any possible threat of BSE in his herd and he’d be finished.’

‘You are remarkably sane.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, and decided not to tell her that it was probably the drugs.

‘But, having disdained it, I now think you are in need of some glibness and fun.’

Silence. Falcón tapped his notebook. A sad inevitability compressed her lips. She smoked it away.

‘Bring on the questions, Inspector Jefe,’ she said, beckoning him to her.

‘You can still call me Javier.’

‘Well, Javier, at least you’ve learnt a few things.’

‘Like what?’

‘How to ease somebody…or rather how to ease a suspect, into an interrogation.’

‘Do you think you’re a suspect?’ he asked.

‘I’d like to be one so that we can relive the detective/suspect dynamic,’ she said drily.

‘And how do you know it was murder?’

‘Why are you here, Javier?’

‘I investigate any death that is not by natural causes.’

‘Did Rafael die of a heart attack?’

Falcón shook his head.

‘So it’s murder.’

‘Or a suicide pact.’

‘Pact?’ she said, stubbing out the cigarette. ‘What pact?’

‘We found Sra Vega dead upstairs, suffocated by her pillow.’

‘Oh my God,’ she said, looking over her shoulder. ‘Mario.’

‘Sr Vega had drunk a litre of drain cleaner, which was probably either boosted or poisoned, or he’d taken pills beforehand. We’ll have to wait for the Médico Forense’s report.’

‘I can’t believe it.’

‘You mean you didn’t think he was the suicidal type?’

‘He appeared so connected to life. His work, the family…especially Mario. He’d just bought a new car. They were going away on holiday…’

‘Was Sr Vega there when you called last night about Mario?’

‘I spoke to Lucía. I assumed he was there but I don’t know.’

‘Where were they going on holiday?’ asked Falcón.

‘Normally they go to El Puerto de Santa María but this time they thought Mario was old enough so they’d rented a house in La Jolla near San Diego and they were going to take him to Sea World and Disneyland.’

‘Florida would have been closer.’

‘Too humid for Lucía,’ she said, lighting another cigarette and shaking her head, staring at the ceiling. ‘We’ve got no idea what goes on in people’s heads.’

‘His lawyer didn’t mention any of this.’

‘He might not have known about it. Rafael was the type who kept his life compartmentalized. He didn’t like overlaps, one thing bleeding into another. Everything had to be separate and in its place. I got all the holiday stuff from Lucía.’

‘So he was a control freak?’

‘Like a lot of successful businessmen.’

‘You met him through Raúl?’

‘He was very supportive after Raúl was murdered.’

‘He let Mario sleep over?’

‘He liked my boys, too.’

‘Was it a regular thing, Mario sleeping over?’

‘At least once a week. Normally on a weekday night or over the weekend in the summer when I have more time,’ she said. ‘The only thing he wouldn’t allow was for Mario to go in the pool.’

‘Surprising that Sr Vega didn’t have a pool.’

‘There was one there but he filled it in and turfed it over. He didn’t like them.’

‘Did anybody else know about the arrangement with Mario?’

‘They might have if they were nosey enough,’ she said. ‘Don’t you find all this incredibly tedious, Javier?’

‘In my experience it’s through the minutiae of everyday life that you find out about how people really live. The small details lead to bigger things,’ he said. ‘Some years ago I was beginning to find it dull, but now, strangely, I find it quite riveting.’

‘Since you restarted your own life?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I didn’t mean to be so intrusive.’

‘I’d nearly forgotten…but that’s your style, isn’t it, Doña Consuelo?’

‘You can dispense with the Doña, Javier,’ she said. ‘And I’m sorry. It was a thought that should have remained a thought.’

‘I come across a lot of people who think things about me,’ he said. ‘Because of my story I’ve become public property. The only reason I don’t get accosted more is that people have too many questions. They don’t know where to start.’

‘All I meant was that, from my own experience, when the foundations of your life collapse it’s the everyday things that begin to matter. They hold things together,’ she said. ‘I’ve had a lot of rebuilding to do myself since we last met.’

‘New life, new home…new lover?’ he asked.

‘I deserved that,’ she said.

‘It’s just my job.’

‘But was that a personal inquiry or solely for the purposes of your investigation?’

‘Let’s say both,’ said Falcón.

‘I have no lover and…if this is where you’re leading to, Rafael was not interested in me.’

He played that back in his mind and found no nuances.

‘Let’s get back to the minutiae,’ he said. ‘When did you last speak to the Vegas?’

‘I spoke to Lucía at about eleven p.m. to tell her that Mario had fallen asleep and I’d put him to bed. There was some mothers’ talk and that was it.’

‘Was it any longer than usual?’

Consuelo blinked as her eyes filled. Her mouth crumpled around the cigarette. She spat the smoke out, swallowed hard.

‘It was the same as always,’ she said.

‘She didn’t ask to speak to the boy or…’

Consuelo leaned forward, dug her elbows into her thighs and wept. Falcón got to his feet, went to her and gave her a handkerchief. He patted her between the shoulder blades.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘The minutiae lead to bigger things.’

He took the cigarette from her hand and crushed it out in the ashtray. Consuelo recovered. Falcón returned to his chair.

‘Since Raúl’s death I get very emotional about children. All children.’

‘It must have been hard for your boys.’

‘It was, but they showed remarkable resilience. I think I felt more for their loss than they did. It’s surprising the route that grief takes,’ she said. ‘But now I find myself constantly pledging money to kids who’ve been orphaned by AIDS in Africa, to children who’ve been exploited in India and the Far East, to street children in Mexico City and São Paulo, the rehabilitation of boy soldiers…It just pours out of me and I have no idea why this should suddenly have happened.’

‘Didn’t Raúl leave some money to Los Niños de la Calle, the street children charity?’

‘I think it was something deeper than that.’

‘Guilt money for…Arturo? That son of his who was kidnapped and never seen…’

‘Don’t start me off again,’ she said. ‘I can’t stop thinking about that.’

‘OK. Something else,’ he said. ‘Lucía has a sister in Madrid, doesn’t she? She should be able to look after Mario.’

‘Yes, she’s got two children, one who’s Mario’s age. I’ll miss him,’ she said. ‘Losing your father is bad enough, but to lose a mother as well is a catastrophe, especially at that age.’

‘You adapt,’ said Falcón, feeling the stab of his own experience. ‘The survival instinct hasn’t been undermined. You accept love from wherever it comes.’

They stared at each other, minds orbiting around the concept of the parental void, until Consuelo went to the bathroom. As the taps ran Falcón slumped back in his chair, already exhausted. He had to find the stamina for this work again or perhaps try to find new ways of keeping the worlds he pried into at a distance.

‘So what do you think happened in that house last night?’ said Consuelo, face repaired.

‘It looks as if Sr Vega smothered his wife and then killed himself by drinking a bottle of drain cleaner,’ said Falcón. ‘Official cause of death will be established later. If the scenario is as it appears we’ll expect to find pillow material under Sr Vega’s fingernails…that sort of thing, which will give us –’

‘And if you don’t?’

‘Then we’ll have to look deeper,’ said Falcón. ‘We’re already…puzzled.’

‘By the new car and the fact he was going on holiday?’

‘Suicides rarely advertise what they’re about to do. They carry on as normal. Think how many times you’ve heard the relatives of victims say, “But he seemed so calm and normal,”’ said Falcón. ‘It’s because they’ve made up their minds and it’s given them some peace at last. No, we’re puzzled by the scenario and by the strange note.’

‘He wrote a suicide note?’

‘Not exactly. In his fist he had a piece of paper on which was written in English “…the thin air you breathe from 9/11 until the end…”’ said Falcón. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

‘Well, it’s not explaining anything, is it?’ she said. ‘Why 9/11?’

‘One of the forensics said he was probably bankrolling al-Qaeda,’ said Falcón. ‘As a joke.’

‘Except…aren’t we being led to believe that anything is possible these days?’

‘Did Sr Vega seem unstable to you in any way?’

‘Rafael seemed to be completely stable,’ said Consuelo. ‘Lucía was the unstable one. She was a depressive, with occasional bouts of manic compulsive behaviour. Have you seen her wardrobe?

‘A lot of shoes.’

‘Many of them were the same design and colour, as were her dresses. If she liked something she’d buy three straight off. She was on medication.’

‘So, if he was in crisis, given his nature, he would be unlikely to turn to anyone outside the family and he wouldn’t have been able to talk to his wife.’

‘The restaurant business has taught me not to judge people’s lives from the outside. Couples, even crazy ones, have ways of communicating, some of which are not attractive, but they work.’

‘What about their domestic situation? You saw that, too.’

‘I did, but a third party always changes the dynamics. People start behaving.’

‘Is that a general or specific observation?’

‘I meant it specifically but it can be applied generally,’ she said. ‘And that felt like the second time you’ve tried to insinuate that I might have been having an affair with Sr Vega.’

‘Did it?’ said Falcón. ‘Well, I didn’t mean to be specific. I was just thinking that under those stressful circumstances a lover might have been a possibility, and that would have changed mental and marital landscapes.’

‘Not Rafael,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘He’s not the type.’

‘Who is the type?’

She tapped a cigarette on the box, lit it and blew smoke at the glass.

‘Your Inspector Ramírez is the type,’ she said. ‘Where is he, by the way?’

‘He’s taken his daughter to have some medical tests.’

‘Not serious, I hope.’

‘They don’t know,’ said Falcón. ‘But you’re right about Ramírez, he was always a player…combing his hair for the secretaries in the Edificio de los Juzgados.’

‘Maybe the work he did gave him an eye for the vulnerable,’ she said. ‘That’s another definition of the type.’

‘But not, apparently, Rafael Vega. The Butcher.’

‘You said it. That’s a pastime that really doesn’t go with lovemaking: “Do you want to see my latest cuts?”’

‘What did you make of all that?’

‘I used him. His beef always tasted better. Almost all the steaks served in my restaurants are cut by him.’

‘And psychologically…?’

‘It ran in the family. I don’t think it’s any more than that. If his father had been a carpenter…’

‘Of course, some spare-time cabinet making. But butchery…?’

‘It gave Lucía the creeps, but then…she had her sensitivities.’

‘She was squeamish, as well?’

‘Squeamish, nervous, depressed, unable to sleep. She used to take two sleeping pills a night. One to knock her out and then another when she woke up at three or four in the morning.’

‘Bulletproof windows,’ said Falcón.

‘She needed total silence to sleep. The house was hermetically sealed. Once you were inside there was no sense of the outside world. No wonder she was a little crazy. Sometimes when she opened the door I expected a rush of air as if the pressures were different inside.’

‘In a world of glibness and fun she doesn’t sound like much fun,’ said Falcón.

‘There you go again, Javier. That’s number three,’ she said. ‘Anyway, she was glib. She used the material and the trivial to hold her life together. She found relationships complicated. Even Mario could be too much for her at times, which was why she was so happy for him to come over here. But that’s not to say he wasn’t the focus of her life.’

‘So how did Sr Vega fit into his family?’

‘I don’t think they were expecting a child. I didn’t see them much at that time, but I seem to remember it was a shock,’ she said. ‘Anyway, a marriage changes after a child. Perhaps you’ll find that out for yourself one day, Javier.’

‘You pretend not to understand what I’m doing but you know I have to do this. I have to look for the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in a situation,’ said Falcón, sounding oversensitive even to himself. ‘My questions can be ugly, but then it’s not so nice to have a double murderer out there leaving a crime scene to look like a suicide pact.’

‘It’s OK, Javier, I can take it,’ said Consuelo. ‘Despite the attractions of the detective/suspect dynamic I’d rather you eliminated me from your inquiries with whatever ugly questions you have to ask. I have a good memory and I did not enjoy being accused of Raúl’s murder.’

‘Well, these are just the preliminaries. I’m hoping for some harder facts on which to base my suspicions about the way in which the Vegas died. So you’ll be seeing me again.’

‘I look forward to it.’

‘How did you get into the grounds of the Vegas’ house?’

‘Lucía gave me the code to open the gate.’

‘Did anybody else know that?’

‘The maid. Probably Sergei. I’ve no idea, but the Krugmans’ garden butts on to the Vegas’ and there’s a gate at the bottom, so they would have access. As for Pablo Ortega, I don’t know.’

‘Sergei?’ said Falcón. ‘You said he was a Russian or Ukrainian. That’s a bit unusual.’

‘Even you must have noticed the number of Eastern Europeans around these days,’ said Consuelo. ‘I know it’s wrong, but I think people prefer them to Moroccans.’

‘What do you know about Madeleine Krugman?’

‘She’s friendly in the way that Americans are…immediately.’

‘You could say the same of the Sevillanos.’

‘Perhaps that’s why we get so many Americans here every year,’ said Consuelo. ‘I’m not complaining, by the way.’

‘She’s an attractive woman,’ said Falcón.

‘Rafael’s never had it so good in your eyes,’ she said. ‘Anyway, all men think Madeleine Krugman is attractive – even you, Javier. I saw you looking.’

Falcón flushed like a fifteen year old, grinned and ran through a range of displacement activity. Consuelo gave him a sad smile from the sofa.

‘Maddy knows her power,’ she said.

‘So she’s the femme fatale of the barrio?’ asked Falcón.

‘I’m trying to edge her out,’ said Consuelo, ‘but she’s got a few years on me. No. She just knows that men melt around her. She does her best to ignore it. What’s a girl supposed to do when everybody from the gas man to the fishmonger to the Juez de Instrucción and the Inspector Jefe de Homicidios seem to have lost control of their lower jaws?’

‘What about Sr Krugman?’

‘They’ve been married a long time. He’s older.’

‘Do you know what they’re doing here?’

‘Taking a break from living in America. He works for Rafael. He’s designing, or has designed, a couple of his projects.’

‘Were they taking a break after 9/11?’

‘That happened while they were here,’ she said. ‘They were living in Connecticut, he was working in New York and I think they just got bored…’

‘Children?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Have you been to any social occasions there?’

‘Yes…Rafael was there, too.’

‘But not Lucía?’

‘Too much for her.’

‘Any observations?’

‘I’m sure he was probably interested in the idea of having sex with her because that’s what travels through every man’s brain when they see Maddy Krugman, but I don’t think it happened.’

There was a loud bellow from upstairs, the terrible noise of an animal in pain. It shot up Consuelo’s spine and jerked her to her feet. Falcón scrambled out of his chair. Feet rumbled down the stairs. Mario in a pair of shorts and shirt came running down the corridor. He had his arms held out from his puny body, his head thrown back, eyes closed, mouth open in a silent scream. The famous war photograph of the napalm attack on a Vietnam village snapped into Falcón’s mind but not focused on the central figure of a naked Vietnamese girl running down the road. It was on the boy in front of her, his black mouth stretched open, crammed full of horror.

4

Wednesday, 24th July 2002

In his passport photo Martin Krugman, without his beard, looked his age, which was fifty-seven years old. With the beard, which was grey and had been allowed to grow untrimmed, he looked beyond retirement age. Life had been kinder to Madeleine Krugman who was thirty-eight and looked no different from her passport photo taken when she was thirty-one. They could have been father and daughter, and many people would have preferred it that way.

Marty Krugman was tall and rangy, some might say skinny, with a prominent nose which, face on, was blade thin. His eyes were set close together, well back in his head and operated under eyebrows which his wife had given up trying to contain. He did not look like a man who slept much. He drank cup after cup of thick espresso coffee poured from a chrome coffeemaker. Marty was not dressed for the office. His shirt was nearly cheesecloth with a blue stripe, which he wore like a smock outside his faded blue jeans. He had Outward Bound sandals on his feet and sat with an ankle resting on his knee and his hands clinging on to his shin as if he was pulling on an oar. He spoke perfect Spanish with a Mexican inflexion.

‘Spent my youth in California,’ he said. ‘Berkeley, doing Engineering. Then I took some years out in New Mexico painting in Taos and taking trips down to Central and South America. My Spanish is a mess.’

‘Was that in the late sixties?’ asked Falcón.

‘And seventies. I was a hippy until I discovered architecture.’

‘Did you know Sr Vega before you came here?’

‘No. We met him through the estate agent who rented the house to us.’

‘Did you have any work?’

‘Not at that stage. We were playing it fast and easy. It was lucky that we met Rafael in the first few weeks. We got talking, he’d heard of some of my New York stuff and he offered me some project work.’

‘It was very lucky,’ said Madeleine, as if she might have flown the coop if it hadn’t worked out.

‘So you came here on a whim?’

Maddy had changed out of the white linen trousers into a knee-length skirt which flared out over her cream leather chair. She crossed and uncrossed her very white legs several times a minute and Falcón, who was sitting directly opposite her, annoyed himself by looking every time. Her breasts trembled under her blue silk top with every movement. Hormonal sound waves seemed to pulse out into the room as her blue blood ticked under her white skin. Marty was impervious to it all. He didn’t look at her or react to anything she said. When she spoke his gaze remained fixed on Falcón, who was having trouble finding a resting place for his own eyes with the whole room now an erogenous zone.

‘My mother died and I inherited some money,’ said Maddy. ‘We thought we’d take a break and be in Europe for a while…visit our old honeymoon haunts: Paris, Florence, Prague. But we went to Provence and then Marty had to see Barcelona…get his Gaudí fix, and one thing led to another. We found ourselves here. Seville gets into your blood. Are you a Sevillano, Inspector Jefe?’

‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘When did all this happen?’

‘March last year.’

‘Were you taking a break from anything in particular?’

‘Just boredom,’ said Marty.

‘Your mother’s death, Sra Krugman…was that sudden?’

‘She was diagnosed with cancer and died within ten weeks.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Falcón. ‘What was boring you in America, Sr Krugman?’

‘You can call us Maddy and Marty if you like,’ she said. ‘We prefer to be relaxed.’

Her perfect white teeth appeared behind her chillired lips in a two centimetre smile and were gone. She spread her fingers out on the leather arms of the chair and switched her legs over again.

‘My job,’ said Marty. ‘I was bored with the work I was doing.’

‘No you weren’t,’ she said, and their eyes met for the first time.

‘She’s right,’ said Marty, his head slowly coming back to Falcón. ‘Why would I be working here if I was bored with my job? I was bored with being in America. I just didn’t think you’d be interested in that. It’s not a detail that’s going to help you find out what happened to the Vegas.’

‘I’m interested in everything,’ said Falcón. ‘Most murder has a motive…’

‘Murder?’ said Maddy. ‘The officer on the gate told me it was suicide.’

‘Self-murder,’ said Falcón. ‘If that’s what it was. It’s all motivated, which means I’m interested in everybody’s motives for doing anything. It is all indicative.’

‘Of what?’ asked Maddy.

‘A state of mind. Degrees of happiness and disappointment, joy and anger, love and hate. You know, the big emotions that make things happen and break things down.’

‘This guy doesn’t sound like a cop,’ said Marty in English, throwing the line over his shoulder to his wife.

Her eyes were on Falcón, digging deep, excavating his cranium in a way that made him think that he must look like somebody she knew.

‘What was so wrong with America that you had to leave?’ asked Falcón.

‘I didn’t say anything was wrong,’ said Marty, bracing his shoulders as if he was at the start of the Olympic sculls final. ‘I was just bored with the grind of daily life.’

‘Boredom is one of our strongest motivations,’ said Falcón. ‘What did you want to get away from? What were you looking for?’

‘Sometimes the American way of life can be a rather enclosed world,’ said Marty.

‘There are a lot of Sevillanos who’ve hardly been outside Andalucía, let alone Spain,’ said Falcón. ‘They don’t see the need for it. They don’t think there’s anything wrong with their enclosed world.’

‘Maybe they don’t question it.’

‘Why should they when they live in the most beautiful place on earth?’

‘Have you ever been to America, Inspector Jefe?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’ asked Marty, indignant.

‘It’s the greatest nation on earth,’ said Maddy, bright, cheerful and ironical.

‘Probably…’ said Falcón, thinking it through as he spoke, ‘because what I’d be looking for there has gone.’

Marty slapped out a beat on his shin, delighted.

‘What would that be?’ asked Maddy.

‘What had transfixed me as a boy…which was all those black-and-white noir movies of the forties and fifties. They were the reason I became a detective.’

‘You’d be disappointed,’ said Marty. ‘Those streets, that life, those values…we’ve moved on from them.’

‘You’ve made a big mistake here, Inspector Jefe,’ said Maddy. ‘America is Marty’s favourite topic. We get out of there and suddenly that’s all he wants to talk about. He wakes me up at night because he has to tell me his latest theory. What was it last night, honey?’

‘Fear,’ said Marty, his dark peepers flashing from deep in his head like tropical birds escaping into the jungle.

‘America is a society based on fear,’ said Maddy flatly. ‘That’s the latest. It’s sad that he thinks he’s the first one to think them.’

‘Well, now, I suppose, in the post September 11th world…’

‘Not just now,’ said Marty. ‘It’s always been fear.’

‘Forget the pioneering spirit,’ said Maddy, hurling her hand over her shoulder.

‘There have always been pioneers,’ said Marty. ‘The strong and fearless men…’

‘This is very interesting,’ said Falcón, seeing his mistake now. ‘And it would be fascinating were it not for the fact that I have a double death to investigate.’

‘You see, he’s not that interested in your motives,’ said Maddy, and Marty flicked a dismissive finger at her. ‘And by the way, Inspector Jefe, he still thinks it’s the greatest nation on earth, despite…’

‘When did you last speak to the Vegas?’ asked Falcón.

‘I spoke to him yesterday evening about seven o’clock in the office,’ said Marty. ‘It was a technical conversation, nothing personal. He was businesslike, professional…the usual.’

‘Were you aware of any financial difficulties that might have put pressure on Sr Vega?’

‘He was always under pressure. It’s the nature of construction. There’s a lot to think about: the building, the machinery, materials and labour, budgets and money…’

‘And you?’ Falcón said, turning to Maddy.

‘Me?’ she replied, coming out of some deep, distracting thought.

‘The last time you spoke to Sr Vega?’

‘I don’t…I can’t think,’ she said. ‘When would that have been, honey?’

‘Dinner last week,’ he said.

‘How were the Vegas then?’

‘Rafael came on his own,’ said Marty.

‘As usual,’ said Maddy. ‘Lucía always cancelled at the last minute. The kid or something. She didn’t like these dinners of ours. She was a traditionalist. You only go to dinner at someone else’s house if they’re family. She found it awkward. She had no conversation, except about Mario and I’ve never had children, so…’

‘She was neurotic,’ said Marty.

‘How did Sr Vega and his wife get along?’

‘He was very loyal to her,’ said Maddy.

‘Does that mean love no longer came into it?’

‘Love?’ she said.

Marty stared at her, nodding, his nose sawing through the chill air, as if willing her to conclude what she’d embarked on.

‘Don’t you think loyalty is a part of love, Inspector Jefe?’

‘I do,’ said Falcón. ‘But you seem to have separated loyalty from the whole, as if that was all that remained.’

‘Don’t you think that’s the nature of a marriage…or of love, Inspector Jefe?’ she said, ‘That time degrades it, wears away at passion and ardour, the thrill of sex…’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Marty in English.

‘…the intensity of interest you have in what the other says or thinks, the wild hilarity of the smallest jokes, the deep, unquestioning admiration of physical beauty, intelligence, moral certitude…’

‘Yes,’ said Falcón, his insides starting to bind up, as they did sometimes in therapy sessions with his psychologist, Alicia Aguado. ‘That’s true…’

He sat back, let his intestines have some room, wrote some gibberish down in his notebook, wanted to get out of there.

‘So, are you saying, Sra Krugman, that the Vegas’ marriage, in your opinion, was strong…?’

‘I only observed that he was loyal to her. She was an unwell and, at times, an unhappy woman, but she was the mother of his child and that had considerable weight with him.’

The ground seemed to firm up under Falcón’s chair as the business at hand reasserted itself.

‘Sr Vega liked to control things,’ said Falcón.

‘He had firm ideas about how things should be done and he had a very disciplined mind,’ said Marty. ‘I never saw further into his corporation than was necessary for me to do my work. He didn’t attempt to involve me in anything outside my own project. He would even ask me to leave his office if he was going to talk about other jobs on the phone. He was very concerned about hierarchy, the way things were reported to him, who did what and the chain of command. I don’t have any direct experience of this, but his style seemed military to me, which is no bad thing on a construction site. People can get killed very easily.’

‘In life, too,’ said Maddy.

‘What?’ said Marty.

‘He liked to control things in life, too. The gardener, his family, his meat,’ she said, chopping her hand down on to her knee.

‘It’s odd then that he’d come over here for dinner,’ said Falcón. ‘If he was going to put himself in the hands of others, I’d have thought he’d prefer a restaurant.’

‘He understood it as an American thing,’ said Marty.

‘He liked it,’ said Maddy, shrugging her shoulders so that her loose breasts shifted under the silk. Her legs slipped to one side and she rubbed them together, as if taming an itch.

I bet he did, thought Falcón.

‘A controlling man might kill himself if his carefully constructed world was about to fall apart due to financial ruin or a shaming scandal. It could also collapse because of an emotional involvement that went wrong. News of the first two scenarios, if they existed, will break soon enough. Do you know anything about the third possibility?’

‘Do you think he was the type to have affairs?’ Marty asked his wife.

‘Affairs?’ said Maddy, almost to herself.

‘He would have left a note,’ said Marty. ‘Did he?’

‘Not a conventional one,’ said Falcón, and gave them the text.

‘That seems almost a little too poetic for someone like Rafael,’ said Maddy.

‘What about the 9/11 reference?’ said Falcón. ‘You must have talked about that with him.’

Maddy rolled her eyes.

‘Sure,’ said Marty. ‘We talked about it endlessly, but as an item of current affairs. I really don’t understand its significance in this context.’

‘Why kill your wife?’ asked Maddy, which relieved Falcón, who didn’t want Marty’s theories on 9/11 at this stage of his inquiry. ‘I mean, if you’re suffering like that, kill yourself by all means, but don’t leave your kid with no parents.’

‘Maybe he thought Lucía would not be able to survive without him,’ said Marty.

‘That would be true,’ she said.

‘Do you always allow this much conjecture into your investigations, Inspector Jefe?’ asked Marty.

‘No,’ said Falcón, ‘but the situation in the Vegas’ house was sufficiently enigmatic that I have to keep an open mind until I get a full forensic report and the pathology of the bodies. Also the closest person to Sr Vega, his wife, is dead, too. I have to rely on people who knew him peripherally – socially or in business.’

‘Lucía’s parents should be able to help you,’ said Marty. ‘They were around there almost every Sunday for lunch.’

‘Did you ever meet them?’

‘I met them once,’ said Maddy. ‘They weren’t…er…very sophisticated people. I think he used to be a farmer.’

‘How long have you been married?’ asked Falcón.

‘Twelve years,’ she said.

‘How did you meet?’ he said, a question he’d found himself asking every couple he’d met over the last year.

‘It was in New York,’ said Marty. ‘Maddy was showing a collection of her photographs at a gallery which was owned by a friend of mine. She introduced us.’

‘And I never went back to my apartment,’ said Maddy.

‘Are you still a photographer?’

‘She’s taken it up again since we left the States,’ said Marty, steamrollering over Maddy’s negative.

‘What do you photograph?’

‘People,’ she said.

‘Portraits?’

‘Never.’

‘She photographs people in their unconscious moments,’ said Marty.

‘He doesn’t mean when they’re sleeping,’ she said, her eyes flashing with irritation.

‘When they don’t know the camera is there?’ asked Falcón.

‘One step further than that,’ said Marty. ‘When they believe themselves to be completely alone.’

‘That makes me sound like a snoop,’ she said. ‘I’m not a –’

‘Yes, you are,’ said Marty, laughing.

‘No, I’m not,’ she said, ‘because that implies that I’m interested in what people are doing, and that’s not it.’

‘What is it?’ asked Marty. Then, turning to Falcón, he added, ‘She never shoots me.’

‘It’s the internal struggle,’ she said. ‘I hate it when you make me say these things. It’s just not –’

‘Have you got any shots of Sr Vega?’ said Falcón.

They left Marty on the sofa and went upstairs. One of three bedrooms had been converted into a darkroom. While Maddy looked through her contact sheets Falcón checked the books on the shelves and pulled out one with Madeleine Coren on the spine. There was a photograph of her on the inside flap – a creamy beauty with sparkling eyes, challenging the camera to come closer. She had the dazzle of youth then, which had been skimmed down by life’s natural damage to its present translucence. There was still something of the celebrity about her, that quality that film producers look for: not beauty, but watchability. She absorbed things from around her – available light, unused energy and anything anybody might want to give. Falcón opened the book, tore himself away from her profile. He could feel his bone marrow weakening.

Her photographs at first seemed to be about loneliness: old people sitting on park benches, a young man standing at a rail overlooking a river, a woman in a towelling robe on a roof terrace in Manhattan. Gradually, as the camera’s eye moved closer, other things became evident: contentment on the old person’s face, possibility in the young man’s eyes, dreaminess in the woman’s face.

‘They’re facile, those early ones,’ said Maddy. ‘The idea was just a gimmick. I was only twenty-two. I didn’t know anything. Take a look at these –’

She handed him six black-and-white prints. The first three showed Rafael Vega in a white shirt and dark trousers, hands in pockets, standing on his well-clipped lawn. The camera was looking over his shoulder at his profile. His jaw was tight. Falcón waited for the shot to tell him something. Then he saw what it was.

‘He’s barefoot.’

‘That was 14th January this year.’

‘What was he doing?’

‘That’s not the point…remember,’ she said. ‘I’m not a snoop. Look at these. They’re taken down by the river. I go there a lot. I can sit with a big zoom lens on a tripod and people will stop on Calle Bétis and the bridges. I pick up a lot of contemplative looks. People go to the river for a reason…don’t they?’

The three shots she gave him were close-ups of head and shoulders. In the first Rafael Vega was wincing, in the second he was gritting his teeth, eyes screwed up, and in the third his mouth had cracked open.

‘He’s in pain,’ said Falcón.

‘He was crying,’ said Maddy. ‘There’s saliva at the corners of his mouth.’

He gave her back the photos. They were intrusive and he didn’t like them. He returned her book to the shelf.

‘And you didn’t think any of this was worth mentioning before?’

‘This is my work,’ she said. ‘This is how I express myself. I wouldn’t have shown you them if Marty hadn’t pushed me.’

‘Even though it could have a bearing on what happened in the Vegas’ house last night?’

‘I answered your questions – the last time we spoke, how the Vegas got along, whether he was having an affair. I just didn’t relate any of that to these shots because the point is that we should never know about them. They were not taken for the purposes of investigating causes.’

‘Why were they taken?’

‘These are shots of people suffering in intensely private moments, but out in the open. They have chosen not to hide in their homes but to walk it out of themselves in the presence of other human beings.’

Falcón remembered the hours he’d spent walking the streets of Seville in the past fifteen months. The contemplation of the fundamentals of his existence were too unsettling for the confines even of his sprawling house on Calle Bailén. He’d walked it all out of himself, stared it all into the sloe-black waters of the Guadalquivir, shaken it all off into the empty sugar sachets and cigarette ends on the floors of anonymous bars. It was true. He had not sat at home with his horrors piling up in his mind. There was solace in the wordless company of strangers.

Maddy was standing close to him. He was aware of her smell, the body under its thin sheath of silk, the exquisite pressure, the flimsiness of the barrier. She hovered, expectant, confident of her ability. Her white throat trembled as she swallowed.

‘We should go back downstairs,’ said Falcón.

‘There was something else I wanted to show you,’ she said, and led him across the corridor to another bedroom, which had a bare tiled floor and more of her photographs on the walls.

His attention was grabbed by a colour shot of a blue pool with a white necklace of tiles in a green lawn with a purple flame of bougainvillea in one corner and a white cushioned lounger in the other. A woman sat on the lounger in a black bathing costume under a red hat.

‘That’s Consuelo Jiménez,’ he said.

‘I didn’t know you knew her,’ said Maddy.

He went to the window. Across the road Consuelo’s garden was visible.

‘I had to get up on the roof for the angle,’ she said.

To his left he could see the Vegas’ entrance and driveway through the trees.

‘Do you know what time Sr Vega came back home last night?’

‘No, but it was rarely before midnight.’

‘You wanted to show me something?’ he said, turning back in to the room.

On the back wall behind the door, framed in black, was a print 75 cm by 50 cm of a man staring down from a bridge, under which it was clear his whole life was flowing. The features of the man did not compute at first. There was too much going on in the face. It was a shock for him to discover that he was looking at himself – a Javier Falcón he’d never seen before.

5

Wednesday, 24th July 2002

Back at the crime scene next door everybody had moved upstairs into the Vegas’ bedroom. Calderón had already signed off the levantamiento del cadáver for Sr Vega. The body was in a bag on a trolley in the hallway, waiting in the air conditioning to be loaded on to the ambulance and taken down to the Instituto Anatómico Forense on Avenida Sánchez Pizjuan.

The crime scene team were now congregated around the bed, looking down at Sra Vega, hands behind backs, solemn as if in prayer. The pillow was off her face and had been put in a plastic bag and leaned against the wall. Her mouth was open. The top lip and teeth were set in a snarl as if she’d left life bitterly. Her lower jaw was off centre.

‘She’d been hit once with the right hand,’ Calderón explained to Falcón. ‘The jaw’s dislocated…Probably knocked her unconscious. The Médico Forense thinks it was done with the flat of the hand, rather than a closed fist.’

‘What was the time of death?’

‘Same time as the husband: three, three thirty. He can’t be more accurate than that.’

‘Sra Jiménez said she used sleeping pills, two a night, to knock herself out. She must have woken up and had to be subdued before being suffocated. Is there any link between this death and Sr Vega’s yet?’

‘Not until I get them back to the Instituto,’ said the Médico Forense.

‘We’re hoping for some sweat or saliva on the upper side of the pillow,’ said Felipe.

‘This strengthens your case for an unknown murderer, Inspector Jefe,’ said Calderón. ‘I can’t see a husband dislocating his wife’s jaw.’

‘Unless, as I said, she woke up, perhaps got out of bed just as Sr Vega came in full of intent. She might have seen something different in him, become hysterical and he felt the need for violence,’ said Falcón. ‘I’m still keeping an open mind on this. Any ghosts in here?’

‘Ghosts?’ asked Calderón.

‘Something that makes a crime scene look “off”, not as it should be,’ said Falcón. ‘We all had the same feeling about Sr Vega’s body in the kitchen. Somebody else had been there.’

‘And here?’

Jorge shrugged.

‘She was murdered,’ said Felipe. ‘Nobody was trying to make this scene look like anything else. Whether it was Sr Vega remains to be seen. All we’ve got is the pillow.’

‘What did the neighbours have to say?’ asked Calderón, moving away from the others in the room.

‘We have some conflicting views,’ said Falcón. ‘Sra Jiménez has known Sr Vega for some time and did not consider him the suicidal type. She also noted the new car and said he was about to go on holiday to San Diego. Sra Krugman, however, showed me these photographs, taken recently, of Sr Vega in private, clearly distressed and possibly unstable. She let me have this contact sheet.’

Calderón looked over the images, frowning.

‘He’s barefoot in his garden in January,’ said Falcón. ‘And there’s another one of him crying down by the river.’

‘What’s she doing, taking these photographs?’ asked Calderón.

‘It’s her work,’ said Falcón. ‘The way she expresses herself.’

‘Taking shots of people’s private distress?’ said Calderón, raising an eyebrow. ‘Is she weird?’

‘She told me that she was interested in the private, inner struggle,’ said Falcón. ‘You know, that voice that Sr Vázquez talked about. The one nobody ever hears.’

‘But what’s she doing with it?’ asked Calderón. ‘Recording the face but not the voice…I mean, what’s the point?’

‘The voice is loud in the head but silent to the outside world,’ said Falcón. ‘She’s interested in the distressed person’s need to be out in the open…amongst his fellow strangers, walking his pain out of himself.’

They exchanged a look, left the room and went into Mario’s bedroom. Calderón gave him back the contact sheet.

‘What’s all that bullshit about?’ said Calderón.

‘I’m telling you what she said.’

‘Is she getting some…vicarious experience from this?’

‘She’s got a photograph of me on her wall,’ said Falcón, still seething. ‘A blow-up of me staring down into the river from the Puente de Isabel II, for God’s sake.’

‘She’s like some paparazzo of the emotions,’ said Calderón, wincing.

‘Photographers are strange people,’ said Falcón, who was one himself. ‘Their currency is perfect moments from real life. They define their idea of perfection to themselves and then pursue it…like prey. If they’re lucky they find an image that intensifies their idea, makes it more real…but in the end they’re capturing ephemera.’

‘Ghosts, internal struggles, captured ephemera…’ said Calderón. ‘This is unusable stuff.’

‘Let’s wait for the autopsy. That should give us something tangible to work with. In the meantime I’d like to find Sergei, the gardener, who was physically the closest person to the crime scene and discovered the body.’

‘There’s another ghost,’ said Calderón.

‘We should search his rooms down at the bottom of the garden.’

Calderón nodded.

‘Maybe I’ll go across and take a look at Sra Krugman’s photographs while you search the gardener’s rooms,’ said Calderón. ‘I want to see these shots full size.’

Falcón tracked the judge with his eyes back to the second crime scene. Calderón exchanged words with the Médico Forense, rolling his mobile in his hand like a bar of soap. He trotted down the stairs in a hurry. Falcón shrugged away the unsettling thought that Calderón seemed oddly self-conscious and keen, which was not part of his usual knowing style.

As he sweated his way down the unshaded lawn Falcón noticed a pile of blackened paper in the grill on the paved barbecue area. The uppermost paper had been crumpled and was thoroughly burned so that it disintegrated at the touch of his pen. Beneath it were pages that had not been so completely consumed by fire, on which there was discernible handwriting.

He called Felipe down to the garden with his forensic kit. He looked it over wearing his custom-made magnified goggles.

‘We’re not going to save much of this,’ he said, ‘if anything.’

‘They look like letters to me,’ said Falcón.

‘I can only make out partial words, but the writing has that rounded look of a female hand. I’ll take a shot of it before we wreck it.’

‘Give me the partial words you can see.’

Felipe called out some words which at least confirmed the language as Spanish and he took a couple of shots with his digital camera. The blackened paper collapsed as he dug in deeper with his pen. He found a partial line ‘en la escuela’ – in the school – but nothing else. At the bottom of the pile he came across paper of a different quality. Felipe lifted some filigree remains from the blackened flakes.

‘This is a modern photograph,’ he said. ‘They’re very flammable. The chemicals blister as the paper underneath burns and all that’s left is this. Older photographs don’t burn so easily. The paper is thicker and higher quality.’

He teased out some paper which was glossy black and curled at the edges but still white in the middle. He turned it over to reveal a black-and-white shot of a girl’s head and shoulders. She was standing in front of a woman whose presence had been reduced to a ringed hand resting on the girl’s clavicle.

‘Can we date it?’

‘This sort of stock hasn’t been used commercially in Spain for years, but it could have been developed privately or come from abroad where they are still using that kind of stuff. So…tricky,’ said Felipe. ‘The girl’s hairstyle looks a bit old-fashioned.’

‘Sixties, seventies?’ asked Falcón.

‘Maybe. She certainly doesn’t look like a girl from the pueblo. And the woman’s hand on her shoulder doesn’t look as if it’s done any manual labour. I’d have said they were well-off foreigners. I’ve got some cousins out in Bolivia who look a bit like this, you know, just not up to date.’

They bagged the piece of photograph, found some shade and cleaned themselves up.

‘You burn old letters and photographs if you’re putting your house in order,’ said Felipe.

‘Or your head,’ said Falcón.

‘Maybe he did kill himself and we’re just imagining things.’

‘Why would you burn this sort of stuff?’ said Falcón. ‘Painful memories. A part of your life you don’t want your wife to find out about…’

‘Or a part of your life you don’t want your son to find out about,’ said Felipe, ‘when you die.’

‘Perhaps it could be dangerous material if it falls into the wrong hands.’

‘Whose hands?’

‘I’m just saying, you burn this sort of thing to get rid of it because it’s either painful, embarrassing or dangerous.’

‘It could just be a picture of his wife as a girl,’ said Felipe. ‘What would that mean?’

‘Have we tracked down Sra Vega’s parents yet?’ asked Falcón. ‘They should really be looking after the boy, rather than Sra Jiménez.’

Felipe told him that Pérez was working on it. They went down to the gardener’s house. The door was not locked. The two rooms were stuffy, airless and stripped of all possessions. The mattress was half off the bed as if he kept something under there, or perhaps just slept on it outside. The only other furniture in the bedroom was an upturned box, used as a bedside table. The kitchen had a gas ring and bottle of butane. There was no fridge and only dried food out on a sideboard.

‘The staff didn’t see much of the Vega luxury,’ said Felipe.

‘Better than living in Tres Mil Viviendas,’ said Falcón. ‘Why run?’

‘Allergic to police,’ said Felipe. ‘These guys get asthmatic when they see 091 on the wall of the phone booth. A dead body…well, you don’t hang around waiting for the disaster to happen, do you?’

‘Or he might have seen something or someone,’ said Falcón. ‘He must have been aware of Sr Vega burning his papers, probably saw him standing out in the garden in his bare feet. Maybe he even saw what happened last night.’

‘I’ll take some prints and run them through the computer,’ said Felipe.

Falcón walked back up to the house, his shirt sticking to his back. He called Pérez on his mobile.

‘Where are you?’ asked Falcón.

‘Now, I’m in the hospital, Inspector Jefe.’

‘I left you searching the garage and the outside of the house.’

‘I did that.’

‘What about all the burnt papers in the barbecue?’

‘They were burnt. I made a note of it.’

‘Did you hurt yourself?’

‘No.’

‘What are you doing in the hospital then?’

‘Sra Jiménez sent the maid over, saying she was having trouble with the boy, Mario. She thought it would be good for him to see a familiar face, get the grandparents over.’

‘Did you speak to Juez Calderón about this?’

‘Yes.’

‘He didn’t mention it to me.’

‘He had other things on his mind.’

‘Like what?’

‘He’s not going to tell me, is he?’ said Pérez. ‘I could see he was preoccupied, that’s all.’

‘Just tell me why you’re in the hospital,’ said Falcón, who had never quite got used to Pérez’s maddening style of working and reporting.

‘I arrived at the apartment of Sr and Sra Cabello, who are the parents of Sra Vega,’ he said. ‘They’re both in their seventies. They let me in. I tell them what’s happened and Sra Cabello collapses. I thought it was shock, but Sr Cabello says she has a weak heart. I call an ambulance and give her first aid. She’s stopped breathing. I have to give her heart massage and mouth to mouth, Inspector Jefe. The ambulance arrives and fortunately has a defibrillator on board. She’s now in intensive care and I’m sitting here with Sr Cabello. I’ve called his other daughter and she’s on her way down from Madrid on the AVE.’

‘Have you spoken to Sra Jiménez?’

‘I don’t have a number for her.’

‘Juez Calderón?’

‘His mobile’s turned off.’

‘Me?’

‘We’re talking now, Inspector Jefe.’

‘All right, good work,’ said Falcón.

Back in the cool of the house Falcón’s insides felt like smouldering wreckage. Everybody was standing around impatiently. Both bodies were bagged and lying on stretchers in the hallway.

‘What are you waiting for?’ asked Falcón.

‘We need Juez Calderón to sign off the levantamiento del cadáver,’ said the Médico Forense. ‘We can’t find him.’

Falcón called Sra Jiménez on his way over to the Krugmans to tell her about Sra Vega’s parents and the imminent arrival of Lucía’s sister from Madrid. Mario had collapsed with exhaustion and was now sleeping. She asked him over for a drink in the heat.

‘I’ve still got things to do,’ he said.

‘I’ll be here all day,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to work.’

Marty Krugman answered the door stretching as if he’d been dozing on the sofa. Falcón asked after the judge. Marty pointed upstairs and dragged himself back to his sofa, barefoot, his jeans hanging off his backside. Falcón followed the sound of voices speaking English. Calderón was quite fluent and had the eagerness of a leaping puppy.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘I can see that. The sense of deracination is palpable.’

Falcón sighed. Art conversations. He knocked on the door. Maddy tore it open with a sardonic smile on her face. Calderón’s eyes behind her right shoulder were staring, wild with dilated pupils. It put Falcón on the back foot for a moment.

‘Inspector Jefe,’ she said. ‘Juez Calderón and I were having such an interesting conversation, weren’t we?’

Falcón apologized for interrupting but the judge was needed to sign off the second body. Calderón pulled himself together piece by piece, as if he was picking up his clothes in a strange woman’s bedroom.

‘Your mobile was switched off,’ said Falcón.

Maddy raised an eyebrow. Calderón looked around the room to make sure he was leaving nothing incriminating. He gave an uncomfortably protracted goodbye speech whilst holding on to Sra Krugman’s hand, which he kissed at the end. He shambled down the stairs like a schoolboy with a decent report in his satchel and stopped halfway.

‘You’re not coming, Inspector Jefe?’

‘I’ve a question for Sra Krugman.’

Calderón made it clear he would wait.

‘You must go off and do your work, Juez,’ said Maddy, giving him a dismissive little wave.

A herd of emotions ravaged Calderón’s face. Hope, delight, disappointment, longing, jealousy, anger and resignation. They left him trampled. He stumbled down the remaining stairs unable to coordinate his feet.

‘Your question, Inspector Jefe?’ she said, her look as level as the sea’s horizon.

He asked to see the shots of Sr Vega in his garden again. She went into the darkroom and laid the prints out on the table. Falcón pointed to the top corner of the shots.

‘Smoke,’ he said.

‘He was burning stuff,’ she said. ‘He quite often burnt papers down there.’

‘How often?’

‘Since the beginning of the year…quite a lot.’

‘And all your shots are…’

‘From this year,’ she said. ‘Although he didn’t become a regular down at the river until March.’

‘You knew he was disturbed by something,’ said Falcón, annoyed by her now.

‘I told you, it’s not my business,’ she said. ‘And you seem to be confused yourself as to whether it’s suicide or murder.’

He turned without a word and headed for the door.

‘He’s a very sensitive and intelligent man, the Juez,’ she said.

‘He’s a good man,’ said Falcón. ‘And he’s a happy man, too.’

‘They’re a rarity once they get over thirty,’ said Maddy.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I see more men down at the river than I do women.’

‘Women have a talent for remaining connected to the world,’ said Falcón. ‘They find it easier to talk.’

‘There’s no secret to it,’ said Maddy. ‘We just get on with it. Men, like Marty for instance, get sidelined by trying to answer unanswerable questions. They allow things to complicate in their minds.’

Falcón nodded and set off down the stairs. She stood at the top, folded her arms across her chest and leaned against the wall.

‘So, why is the Juez so happy?’

‘He’s getting married later this year,’ said Falcón, without turning.

‘Do you know her?’ she asked. ‘Is she nice?’

‘Yes,’ said Falcón, and he turned to the door.

‘Lighten up’ she said in English. ‘Hasta luego, Inspector Jefe.’

6

Wednesday, 24th July 2002

Falcón understood those words perfectly and he strode back to the Vegas’ house in a fury that was only broken by the sight of the maid walking off towards Avenida de Kansas City. He caught up with her and asked her whether she’d bought any drain cleaner recently. She hadn’t, ever. He asked her when was the last time she’d cleaned the kitchen floor. Sra Vega, who was obsessed with the idea that Mario would catch germs from a dirty floor, had insisted that it was done three times a day. Mario had already gone across to Consuelo Jiménez’s house before she cleaned the floor for the last time yesterday evening.

The ambulance containing the two bodies pulled away as he arrived back at the Vegas’ house. The front door was open. Calderón was smoking in the hallway. Felipe and Jorge nodded to him as they left with their forensic kits and evidence bags. Falcón closed the door behind them against the heat.

‘What did you ask her?’ said Calderón, pushing himself away from the wall.

‘I saw from the barbecue that Vega had been burning papers. I wanted to see if he was burning anything in the shots she had taken of him,’ said Falcón. ‘He was.’

‘Is that all?’ said Calderón, both accusing and mocking.

Falcón’s anger came back to him.

‘Did you get anywhere with her, Esteban?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You were over there for half an hour with your mobile switched off. I assumed you were talking about something with an important bearing on the investigation.’

Calderón dragged hard on his cigarette, drew in the smoke with a rush of air.

‘Did she say what we talked about?’

‘I heard you talking about her photographs as I came up the stairs,’ said Falcón.

‘They’re very good,’ said Calderón, nodding gravely. ‘She’s a very talented woman.’

‘You’re the one who called her a “paparazzo of the emotions”.’

‘That was before she talked to me about her work,’ he said, flicking his cigarette fingers at Falcón. ‘It’s the thinking behind the photographs that makes them what they are.’

‘So they’re not Hola! with feelings?’ said Falcón.

‘Very good, Javier. ‘I’ll remember that one,’ said Calderón. ‘Anything else?’

‘We’ll talk after the autopsy reports have come out,’ said Falcón. I’ll meet Sra Vega’s sister off the AVE and take her to Sra Jiménez later this evening.’

Calderón nodded without knowing what Falcón was talking about.

‘I’ll talk to Sr Ortega now…he’s the other neighbour,’ said Falcón, unable to resist the sarcasm.

‘I know who Sr Ortega is,’ said Calderón.

Falcón went to the front door. By the time he turned back Calderón was already lost in labyrinthine thoughts.

‘I meant what I said this morning, Esteban.’

‘What was that?’

‘I think you and Inés will be very happy together,’ said Falcón. ‘You’re very well suited.’

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘We are. Thanks.’

‘You’d better come with me,’ said Falcón. ‘I’m going to lock up now.’

They left the house and parted ways in the drive. Falcón shut the electric gates with a remote he’d picked up from the kitchen. The entrance to Ortega’s house was to the left of the Vegas’ driveway and covered by a large creeper. He watched Calderón from its shade. The man hovered by his car and appeared to be checking his mobile for messages. He headed off in the direction of the Krugmans’ house, stopped, paced about and gnawed on his thumbnail. Falcón shook his head, rang Ortega’s bell and introduced himself over the intercom. Calderón threw his hands up and went back to his car.

‘That’s the way, Esteban,’ said Falcón to himself. ‘Don’t even think about it.’

The smell of raw sewage had already reached Falcón’s nostrils as he stood by the gate. Ortega buzzed him in to a stink gross enough to make him gag. Large bluebottles cruised the air as threatening as heavy bombers. Brown stains crept up the walls of the corner of the house where a large crack had appeared in the façade. The air seethed with the busy richness of decay. Ortega appeared from around the side of the house which overlooked the lawn.

‘I don’t use the front door,’ said Ortega, whose hand grip was bone-cracking. ‘As you can tell, I have a problem with that side of the house.’

Pablo Ortega’s whole body expressed itself in that handshake. He was compact, unyielding and electric. His hair was long, thick and completely white and fell below the neck of his collarless shirt. His moustache was equally impressive, but had yellowed from smoking. Two creases ran from the entradas of his hairline to his eyebrows and had the effect of pulling Falcón into his dark brown eyes.

‘You’ve only just moved in, haven’t you?’ asked Falcón.

‘Nine months ago…and six weeks later, this shit happens. The house used to have two rooms built over a cesspit, which holds the sewage for the four houses you can see around us. Then the previous owners built another two rooms on top of them and, with the extra weight, six fucking weeks after they sold me the house, the roof of the cesspit cracked, the wall subsided and now I’ve got the shit of four houses bubbling up through the floor.’

‘Expensive.’

‘I have to take down that side of the house, repair the cesspit, strengthen it so it can take the additional weight and then rebuild,’ said Ortega. ‘My brother sent somebody round who’s told me I’m looking at a bill for twenty million, or whatever the fuck that is in euros.’

‘Insurance?’

‘I’m an artist. I didn’t get round to signing the vital piece of paper until it was too late.’

‘Bad luck.’

‘I’m an expert in that particular commodity,’ he said. ‘As I know you are. We’ve met before.’

‘We have?’

‘I came to the house on Calle Bailén. You were seventeen or eighteen.’

‘Most of Seville’s artistic community passed through that house at some stage or other. I’m sorry I don’t remember.’

‘Bad business, that,’ said Ortega, putting a hand on Falcón’s shoulder. ‘I’d never have believed it. You’ve been through the media mill. I’ve read everything, of course. Couldn’t resist it. Drink?’

Pablo Ortega was wearing blue knee-length shorts and black espadrilles. He walked with his feet splayed and had immense, bulbous calf muscles, which looked as if they could support him through long stage runs.

They entered round the back of the house through the kitchen. Falcón sat in the living room while Ortega fetched beer and Casera. The room was chill and odourless apart from the smell of old cigar butts. It was stuffed full of furniture, paintings, books, pottery, glassware and rugs. On the floor leaning against an oak chest was a Francisco Falcón landscape. Javier looked at it and felt nothing.

‘Charisma,’ said Ortega, returning with beer, olives and capers, and nodding at the painting, ‘is like a force field. You don’t see it and yet it has the power to suspend everybody’s normal levels of perception. Now that the world has been told that the emperor has no clothes it’s easy, and all those art historians that Francisco so despised are endlessly writing about what an evident departure the four nudes were from his other work. I’m with Francisco. They’re contemptible. They delighted in his fall but do not see that now all they’re doing is writing about their own failures. Charisma. We are kept in such an ordinary state of boredom that anybody who can light up our life in any way is treated like a god.’

‘Francisco used to substitute the word “genius” for “charisma”,’ said Falcón.

‘If you have mastered the art of charisma you don’t even need genius.’

‘He certainly knew that.’

‘Quite right,’ said Ortega, guffawing back into the armchair.

‘We should get down to business,’ said Falcón.

‘Yes, well I knew something was going on when I saw that rat-faced bastard out there, smug and comfortable in his expensive lightweight suit,’ said Ortega. ‘I’m always suspicious of people who dress well for their work. They want to dazzle with their carapace while their emptiness seethes with all forms of dark life.’

Falcón scratched his neck at Ortega’s melodrama.

‘Who are we talking about?’

‘That…that cabrón…Juez Calderón,’ said Ortega. ‘It even rhymes.’

‘Ah yes, the court case with your son. I didn’t…’

‘He was the cabrón who made sure that Sebastián went down for such a long time,’ said Ortega. ‘He was the cabrón who pushed for the maximum sentence. That man is just the letter of the law and nothing else. He is all sword and no scales and, in my humble opinion, for justice to be justice you have to have both.’

‘I was only told about your son’s case this morning.’

‘It was everywhere,’ said Ortega, incredulous. ‘Pablo Ortega’s son arrested. Pablo Ortega’s son accused. Pablo Ortega’s son blah, blah, blah. Always Pablo Ortega’s son…never Sebastián Ortega.’

‘I was preoccupied at the time,’ said Falcón. ‘I had no mind for current affairs.’

‘The media monster ate its fill,’ said Ortega, snarling and scoffing at the end of his cigar.

‘Do you see your son at all?’

‘He won’t see anybody. He’s shut himself off from the rest of the world.’

‘And his mother?’

‘His mother walked out on him…walked out on us, when he was only eight years old,’ said Ortega. ‘She ran off to America with some fool with a big dick…and then she died.’

‘When was that?’

‘Four years ago. Breast cancer. It affected Sebastián very badly.’

‘So he knew her?’

‘He spent every summer with her from the age of sixteen onwards,’ said Ortega, stabbing the air with his cigar. ‘None of this was taken into consideration when that cabrón…’

He ran out of steam, shifted in his chair, his face crumpled in disgust.

‘It was a very serious crime,’ said Falcón.

‘I realize that,’ said Ortega, loudly. ‘It’s just that the court refused to accept any mitigating circumstances. Sebastián’s state of mind, for instance. He was clearly mentally deranged. How do you explain the behaviour of someone who kidnaps a boy, abuses him, lets him go and then gives himself up? When his time came to defend himself in court he said nothing, he refused to dispute any point of the boy’s statement…he took it all. None of that makes any sense to me. I am not an expert, but even I can see he needs treatment, not prison, violence and solitary confinement.’

‘Have you appealed?’

‘It all takes time,’ said Ortega, ‘and money, of course, which has not been easy. I had to move from my house…’

‘Why?’

‘My life was made impossible. They wouldn’t serve me in the cafés or the shops. People would cross the street if they saw me. For my son’s sins I was being ostracized. It was intolerable. I had to get out. And now here I am…alone with only the shit and stink of others for company.’

‘Do you know Sr Vega?’ asked Falcón, seizing his opportunity.

‘I know him. He introduced himself about a week after I moved in here. I rather admired him for that. He knew why I’d ended up here. There were photographers in the street. He walked straight past them, welcomed me and offered me the use of his gardener. I asked him over for a drink occasionally and when I had the trouble with the cesspit he gave his opinion, sent round a surveyor and costed it all out for me for nothing.’

‘What did you talk about over drinks?’

‘Nothing personal, which was a relief. I thought he might be…you know, when people come round to your door and want to be your friend. I thought he might have a prurient interest in my son’s misfortunes or want to associate himself with me in some way…there are plenty of people out there who’d like to add another dimension to their social standing. But Rafael, despite his apparent charm, was enclosed…everything went in but not a lot came out on a personal level. If you wanted to talk about politics, that was a different matter. We talked about America after September 11th, for instance. That was interesting because he was always very right wing. I mean, he thought José María Aznar a little too communist for his liking. But then the World Trade Centre came down and he maintained that the Americans had that coming to them.’

‘He didn’t like Americans?’ asked Falcón.

‘No, no, no, que no. He liked Americans. He was very friendly with that couple from next door. Marty is working for him and I’m sure Rafael was interested in fucking his wife.’

‘Really?’

‘No, I was just being mischievous, or perhaps giving you a more general truth. We’d all like to fuck Maddy Krugman. Have you seen her?’

Falcón nodded.

‘What do you think?’

‘Why did he think the Americans had it coming to them?’

‘He said they were always messing about in other people’s politics and when you do that things blow up in your face.’

‘Nothing specific then, just bar talk?’

‘But quite surprising, given that he liked Americans and he was going there on holiday this summer,’ said Ortega, kissing the end of his cigar. ‘Another thing he said about Americans was that they’re your friends while you’re useful to them, and as soon as you stop making money for them or giving them help, they drop you like a stone. Their loyalty is measured, it has no faith in it. I think those were his words.’

‘What did you make of that?’

‘Judging by his vehemence it seemed to come from direct experience, probably in business, but I never found out what that was.’

‘How often have you seen him this year?’

‘Two or three times, mostly to do with the cesspit.’

‘Did you notice any difference in him since last year?’

Silence, while Ortega smoked with narrowing eyes.

‘Has he killed himself?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to determine,’ said Falcón. ‘So far we have discovered that there was a change in him at the end of last year. He became more preoccupied. He was burning papers at the bottom of his garden.’

‘I didn’t notice anything, but then our relationship was not intimate. The only thing I remember was in the Corte Inglés in Nervión one day. I came across him picking over leather wallets or something. As I approached to say hello he looked up at me and I could see he was completely spooked, as if I was the ghost of a long-lost relative. I veered away and we didn’t speak. That was probably the last time I saw him. A week ago.’

‘Have you noticed any regular visitors to the house or any unusual ones?’ said Falcón. ‘Any night-time visitors?’

‘Look, I know I’m here all the time, especially these days with the work not coming my way, but I don’t spend my days looking over the fence or squinting between the blinds.’

‘What do you do with your time?’

‘Yes, well, I spend an uncomfortable amount of it inside my own head. More than I should or want to.’

‘What did you do last night?’

‘I got drunk on my own. A bad habit, I know. I fell asleep right here and woke up freezing cold from the air conditioning at five in the morning.’

‘When I asked you about visitors to the Vegas, I didn’t mean anything…’

‘Look, the only regulars I saw were Lucía’s parents and the tough bitch from across the road who used to take care of the kid occasionally.’

‘The tough bitch?’

‘Consuelo Jiménez. You don’t want to cross her, Javier. She’s the kind that only smiles when she’s got a man’s balls in a vice.’

‘You’ve had some disagreements?’

‘No, no, I just recognize the type.’

‘What type is that?’ asked Falcón, unable to resist the question.

‘The type that doesn’t like men but is unfortunately not a lesbian and finds they have to go to men for their demeaning sexual needs. This leaves them in a permanent state of resentment and anger.’

Falcón chewed the end of his pen to stop himself smiling. It sounded as if the great Pablo Ortega had offered his outstanding services and been rebuffed.

‘She likes children, that one,’ said Ortega. ‘She likes little boys running around her legs. The more the better. But as soon as they grow hair…’

Ortega grabbed a great tuft of his white chest hair and flicked his head up in disdain. It was a perfect cameo, in which male foolishness and female pride met in the same body. Falcón laughed. Ortega basked in the acclaim from his audience of one.

‘You know,’ he said, topping up his glass with Cruzcampo, offering it to Falcón who refused, ‘the best way to meet women?’

Falcón shook his head.

‘Dogs.’

‘You have dogs?’

‘I have two pugs. A big, burly male called Pavarotti and a smaller, darker-faced female called Callas.’

‘Do they sing?’

‘No, they crap all over the garden.’

‘Where do you keep them?’

‘Not in here with my collection all over the floor. They’ll cock their leg over a masterpiece and I’ll do something unforgivable.’

‘Your collection?’

‘You don’t think I live in this sort of mess all the time? I had to move my collection in here when the cesspit cracked,’ said Ortega. ‘Anyway, let me finish with the dogs. Pugs are the perfect way to start talking to a lone woman. They’re small, unthreatening, a little ugly and amusing. Perfect. They always work with women and children. The children can’t resist them.’

‘Is that how you met Consuelo Jiménez?’

‘And Lucía Vega,’ he said, winking.

‘Perhaps you don’t realize this…I should have made it clear…Sra Vega has been murdered.’

‘Murdered?’ he said, getting to his feet, beer spilling into his lap.

‘She was suffocated with her pillow…’

‘You mean he killed her and then himself? What about the boy?’

‘He was at Sra Jiménez’s house at the time.’

‘My God…this is a tragedy,’ he said, going to the window, thumping it with his fist and looking out into the garden for some reassurance.

‘What you were saying about Sra Vega…You didn’t have an affair with her, did you?’

‘An affair?’ he said, terrible things now occurring to him. ‘No, no, no que no. I just met her on that little bit of park, walking the dogs. She’s not really my type. She was rather fascinated by my celebrity, that was all.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘I don’t remember. I think she’d seen me in a play or…What did we talk about?’

‘When did this happen?’

‘March some time.’

‘You winked when you mentioned her name.’

‘That was just some ridiculous braggadocio on my part.’

Falcón’s pen hovered over his notebook. He was running some memory footage of fifteen months ago through his mind. The photographs that Raúl Jiménez had hanging on his wall behind his desk in the apartment in the Edificio Presidente. Celebrities who’d dined at his restaurants, but also the people from the town hall, the policemen and the judiciary. And that was where he’d seen Pablo Ortega’s face before.

‘You knew Raúl Jiménez,’ said Falcón.

‘Well, I occasionally ate at his restaurants,’ said Ortega, relieved.

‘I remember you from one of his photographs he kept at home…celebrities and important people.’

‘I can’t think how that happened. Raúl Jiménez loathed the theatre…Unless, of course, that’s it, my brother, Ignacio, he knew Raúl. My brother’s company installs air-conditioning systems. Ignacio would ask me to receptions when he wanted to impress people. That must have been it.’

‘So you knew Consuelo Jiménez before you moved here?’

‘By sight,’ said Ortega.

‘Have you ever managed to interest Sra Krugman in your dogs?’

‘My God, Javier, you’re a different breed to the other policemen I’ve had to deal with.’

‘We’re just people.’

‘The ones I’ve spoken to are much more methodical,’ said Ortega. ‘That’s an observation, not a criticism.’

‘Murder is the greatest aberration of human nature, it brings out some ingenious subterfuges,’ said Falcón. ‘Methodical thinking does not survive well in that illusory world.’

‘Acting is the most ingenious subterfuge of all time,’ said Ortega. ‘Sometimes it’s so ingenious we end up not knowing who the fuck we are any more.’

‘You should meet some of the murderers I’ve put away,’ said Falcón. ‘Some of them have perfected the art of denial to the degree of absolute truth.’

Ortega blinked at that – a horror he hadn’t considered before.

‘I have to go,’ said Falcón.

‘You asked me about Sra Krugman and the dogs,’ he said, a little desperately.

‘She doesn’t look like a dog person to me.’

‘You’re right…Now, if I’d had a leopard in a diamond collar…’

They left via the sliding doors into the garden. Ortega walked Falcón round to the front gate. They stood in the quiet street away from the stink. A large black car rolled slowly past before picking up speed heading in the direction of Avenida de Kansas City. Ortega followed it with his eyes.

‘You know you were asking me about unusual visitors to the Vegas’ house?’ he said. ‘That car’s reminded me. That was a BMW 7 series and there was one of those parked outside their house on 6th January.’

‘La Noche de Reyes.’

‘Which is why I remember the date,’ said Ortega. ‘But I also remember it because of the nationality of the occupants. These guys were unusual. One was huge – fat, powerful, dark-haired and brutal looking. The other one was still heavy and muscular, but he looked a little more human than his friend and he was fair-haired. They spoke and I don’t know what was said, but because I’d been to St Petersburg last year I knew that they were Russians.’

Consuelo Jiménez’s three children and Mario were playing in the pool in the late afternoon. The screaming, shouting and indefatigable mutual bombardment arrived heavily muffled through the double glazing. Only the occasional patter of water on the glass reminded them of the severity of the child artillery barrage. Javier nursed another beer. Consuelo was halfway down a glass of tinto de verano, a mix of red wine, ice and Casera. She smoked, clicking her thumbnail. Her foot, as always when distracted, was nodding.

‘I see you’ve let Mario join in,’ said Falcón.

‘I thought it best to let him lose himself in play for a bit,’ she said. ‘The swimming ban was Rafael’s obsession and there doesn’t seem much point…’

‘I can’t remember when I had that kind of energy,’ said Falcón.

‘There’s nothing more beautiful than a child, eyes stung with chlorine, lashes spiked, body trembling under towel with hunger and tiredness. It overwhelms me with happiness.’

‘You don’t mind me claiming my drink now?’ said Falcón. ‘When I come back with Mario’s aunt…I mean, I’ll have to take her back to her parents’ house, it wouldn’t be the same.’

‘As what?’

‘As seeing you like this.’

‘I have one major advantage over everyone else in this investigation of yours,’ said Consuelo. ‘I know how you work, Inspector Jefe.’

‘You did invite me for a drink.’

‘We’re all part of your world now,’ she said. ‘Helpless under your merciless observation. How did you get on with the others?’

‘I’ve just spent the last hour or so with Pablo Ortega.’

‘Performing, as ever,’ said Consuelo. ‘I could never marry an actor. I’m a monogamist and they can make a bed feel very crowded.’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘No actresses before you married that little truth-seeker…What was her name? Inés. Of course…’

Consuelo stopped.

‘Sorry, I should have remembered about Juez Calderón.’

‘This is the first time I’ve worked with him since your husband’s murder,’ said Falcón. ‘He told me today that he and Inés were getting married.’

‘Doubly insensitive of me,’ said Consuelo. ‘But, my God, that’s going to be quite a truth-seeking union. A juez and a fiscal. Their first born is going to have to become a priest.’

Falcón grunted out a laugh.

‘There’s nothing you can do about it, Javier,’ she said. ‘You might as well laugh.’

‘Lighten up,’ said Falcón. ‘That’s what Sra Krugman told me to do.’

‘She’s not exactly a comedy show herself.’

‘Has she shown you her photographs?’

‘So sad,’ said Consuelo, making the face of the unhappy clown. ‘I’ve had all that bullshit up to here.’

‘Juez Calderón was rather impressed by them,’ said Falcón.

‘By her ass, you mean.’

‘Yes, even all the many Pablo Ortegas stepped down off the pedestal of his ego to pant at her.’

‘I knew you had it in you,’ said Consuelo.

‘I’m angry with Maddy Krugman,’ he said. ‘And I don’t like her.’

‘When a man says that it normally means he fancies her.’

‘I’ll be joining a long queue.’

‘And Juez Calderón will be in front of you.’

‘You noticed.’

A spectacular bomb by one of the children drenched the window. Consuelo went outside and told them to calm down. Falcón was aware of Mario looking at her as if she was a goddess. She came back in. By the time she’d closed the door the madness had restarted.

‘It’s a pity that they have to become us,’ she said, looking back to the pool.

‘You’re not so bad,’ said Falcón, the crass words out of his mouth so fast he stared bug-eyed at them, like a disgrace on the carpet. ‘I mean, when I said that…I meant you were…’

‘Relax, Javier,’ she said. ‘Drink some more beer.’

Falcón gulped down the Cruzcampo, bit into a fat olive and put the stone in the tray.

‘Did Pablo Ortega ever make a pass at you?’ he asked.

‘Was that what you were trying to do then?’

‘No, that was…that was me thinking something and it coming out.’

‘Yes, well…“You’re not so bad,”’ she said, quoting him back. ‘You’ll have to do a lot better than that to improve your sex life. What did Pablo Ortega tell you?’

‘How he used his dogs to chat up women.’

‘You talked about him panting after Maddy and chatting up women, but I’ve always assumed he was a closet gay, or maybe just not that interested in sex,’ she said. ‘The kids love Pavarotti and Callas, but he’s never made a pass at me, and I imagine you wouldn’t miss a pass from Pablo Ortega when it happened.’

‘Why do you think he’s gay?’

‘It’s just a feeling that comes off him when he’s with women. He likes them, but he’s not interested in them sexually. It’s not just me. I’ve seen him with Maddy as well. He’s not panting. He’s showing off. He’s reminding everybody that he’s still potent but it’s got nothing to do with sex.’

‘He referred to you as a tough bitch,’ said Falcón. ‘I thought it was because you’d turned him down.’

‘Well, I am a tough bitch, but I’ve never been one with him. In fact I’ve thought that we always got on very well,’ she said. ‘Since he moved out here he’s been coming round for drinks, playing football with the kids, swimming…’

‘It was unmistakably sexual. He said you only smiled when you had a man’s balls in a vice – that sort of thing.’

Consuelo spurted laughter, but she was annoyed, too.

‘I can only think that he believes that this is manly talk and that it would never get back to me,’ said Consuelo. ‘He’s underestimated your capacity for intimacy, Javier. But then I suppose intimacy between a cop and a…whatever. He probably thought he was safe.’

‘He knew Raúl, didn’t he?’ said Falcón. ‘I remember seeing him in the photographs behind the desk in your old apartment, but not in the celebrity section.’

‘Pablo’s brother was the connection,’ she said. ‘Ignacio had worked for Raúl.’

‘I’d like to see Raúl’s photographs again, if that’s possible.’

‘I’ll let them know at the office,’ she said.

The commercial world of cars – Repsol, Firestone, Renault – flashed past as he drove down Avenida de Kansas City. While the buildings beyond the windscreen throbbed with expended energy, Falcón puzzled over his intimacy with Consuelo Jiménez. He felt comfortable with her. Despite what she referred to as the detective/suspect dynamic, she was now integrated into his past. He thought about her sitting on her sofa in the cool of her house, nodding her foot at the glass, laughing with the children as she rubbed them down with their towels, leading them off to the kitchen for food while he drove into the writhing beast of the metropolis which, beaten by heat, lay panting in its pen.

A sign outside the Estación de Santa Justa at the end of Avenida de Kansas City told him it was 44°C. He parked and staggered through the torpid air into the station. He called Pérez, who told him that he’d persuaded Sr Cabello to leave his wife in intensive care. He was now in Sr Cabello’s apartment in Calle de Felipe II in El Porvenir, waiting for the first female member of the Grupo de Homicidios, Policía Cristina Ferrera, to replace him.

Falcón stood at the gates of the platform for the Madrid AVE, with a handwritten piece of paper asking for Carmen Ortiz. A woman with black hair and big brown eyes floating in a pale frightened face approached him. She had two children with her and ‘distraught’ seemed a mild adjective for her condition.

He drove back to Santa Clara. Carmen Ortiz talked at full tilt all the way, primarily about her husband, who was on a business trip to Barcelona and wouldn’t be able to fly down until the following morning. The children sat looking out of the windows as if they were being moved to a more secure prison. Falcón murmured encouragement while Sra Ortiz flooded out the silence.

Consuelo came to the door with Mario clamped to her like a chimpanzee. The boy, after the swim, had retreated into a vulnerable silence. He transferred himself to Carmen with a swiftness that showed his need for human contact. Carmen amazed them with her limitless memory for all kinds of detail from her journey. Consuelo listened, knowing Carmen Ortiz’s purpose, which was not to allow one moment’s silence in which the calamity of the day could jam its wedge and lever time open to reveal Mario’s future of despair and loneliness.

They went to the car. The whole family sat in the back. The children stroked Mario as if he was a damaged kitten. Consuelo leant in and kissed him hard on the head. Falcón almost heard the physical wrench as she pulled back from the car. He knew about the sickening sense of plummet that was forming in the boy’s stomach as he started his free fall into motherless chaos. The routine of love was over. The woman who made you has gone. He was filled with pity for the boy. He drove off with his bruised cargo back into the pulsating city.

He took them up to Sr Cabello’s apartment, carrying the luggage. They arrived in the apartment like nomads. Sr Cabello sat in a rocking chair with unblinking eyes. His grandchildren animated his lips to a tremble. Mario kicked and fought to hold on to his aunt. Pérez had gone. Falcón and Ferrera withdrew and a whimpering sense of impending doom welled up in the destroyed family.

They went down in the lift. Ferrera sighed with her head to one side as if the pain of the exchange had found its way into her neck and cricked it for good. They drove in silence into the centre of town where Falcón was going to drop her off. She shut the car door and walked back to a crossing. Falcón pulled out and drove around the Plaza Nueva. He turned right into Calle Mendez Nuñez and waited by El Corte Inglés. As he veered away from the Plaza de la Magdalena and prepared to turn down Calle Bailén his mobile went off.

‘I don’t want to sound like an idiot in my first week,’ said Cristina Ferrera, ‘but I think you’re being followed. It was a blue Seat Cordoba two cars behind you. I got the plates.’

‘Phone them through to the Jefatura and get them to give me a call,’ said Falcón. ‘I’ll check it out.’

In the fading light he could still distinguish colour and he picked out the Seat, now only a single car behind him, as he eased past the Hotel Colón. He drove past the tile shop just before his house and turned up the short driveway and parked between the orange trees. He got out. The blue Seat stopped in front of him. It seemed to be a full car. He walked towards it and the car, in no hurry, pulled slowly away. He even had time to see the plates before it turned left past the Hotel Londres on the corner.

The Jefatura called him on his mobile and told him that the registration number reported by Cristina Ferrera did not match a blue Seat Cordoba. He told them to report it to the traffic police to see if they could get lucky.

He opened up the doors to his house, parked the car and closed them. He felt uneasy. His flesh crawled. He stood in the patio and looked around, listening as if he might be being burgled. The noise of distant traffic came to him. He went to the kitchen. Encarnación, his housekeeper, had left him some fish stew in the fridge. He boiled some rice, warmed the stew and drank a glass of cold white wine. He ate facing the door in a strange state of expectancy.

After eating he did something that he hadn’t done for a long time. He picked up a bottle of whisky and a tumbler of ice and went to his study. He’d installed a grey velvet chaise longue he’d moved down from one of the upstairs rooms. He lay down on it with a good measure of whisky in the glass, which he rested on his chest. He was exhausted by the day’s events but sleep, for many reasons, was a long way off. Falcón drank the whisky more methodically than he approached any of his investigations. He knew what he was doing – it takes some purpose to blot out damage. By the bottom of the third glass he’d worked over Mario Vega’s new childhood and Sebastián Ortega’s difficult life with a famous father. Now it was Inés’s turn. But he was lucky. His body wasn’t used to this level of alcohol and he quietly passed out with his cheek on the soft grey pelt of the chaise longue.

7

Thursday, 25th July 2002

The heat did not back off during the night. By the time Falcón arrived at the Jefatura at 7.30 a.m. the street temperature was 36°C and the atmosphere as oppressive as an old régime. The short walk from his car to the office with a hangover like a hatchet buried in his head left him gasping, with odd flashes of light going off behind his eyes.

At one of the desks in the outer office he was surprised to find Inspector Ramírez already at work, two thick fingers poised over the computer keyboard. Falcón had always doubted that he and Ramírez would ever be friends since he’d taken the job that Ramírez had thought should have been his. But he’d been getting on better with his number two in the last four months since he’d started full-time work again. While Falcón had been suspended from duty due to depressive illness, Ramírez had seized the opportunity for command with both hands, only to find that he didn’t like it. Its pressures did not suit his personality. Not only did he lack the necessary creative streak to launch a new investigation, but he could be explosive and divisive. In January Falcón had returned to part-time work. By March he had been reinstated as Inspector Jefe full time and Ramírez had been grateful. These developments had reduced the tension within the squad. They now rarely used each other’s ranks in addressing each other in private.

‘My God,’ said Ramírez, ‘what happened to you?’

‘Buenos días, José Luis. It was a bad day for children, yesterday,’ said Falcón. ‘I got friendly with the whisky again. How did it go at the hospital?’

Ramírez stared up from the desk and Javier had the vertiginous experience of teetering over two dark, empty lift shafts which led directly to this man’s pain and intolerable uncertainty.

‘I haven’t slept,’ said Ramírez. ‘I’ve been to early-morning Mass for the first time in thirty years and I’ve confessed my sins. I’ve prayed harder than I’ve ever done in my life – but it doesn’t work like that, does it? This is my penance. I must watch the sufferings of the innocent.’

He breathed in and covered his cheeks with his hands.

‘They’re keeping her in for four days to conduct a series of tests,’ he said. ‘Some of these tests are for very serious conditions like lymphatic cancer and leukaemia. They have no idea what the problem is. She’s thirteen years old, Javier, thirteen.’

Ramírez lit a cigarette and smoked with one arm across his chest as if he was holding himself together. He talked about the tests as if he’d already confirmed to himself that she had something serious and the terrible words of future treatment were creeping into his vocabulary – chemotherapy, nausea, hair loss, crashing immune system, risk of infection. Footage came to Falcón’s lurid mind of huge-eyed children beneath the perfect domes of their fragile craniums.

His cigarette suddenly tasted foul to Ramírez, who crushed it out and spat the smoke into his lap as if it was responsible for his child’s health. Falcón talked him down, reminded him that these were just tests, to stay calm and positive and that he could take any time off that he needed. Ramírez asked to be put to work to stop his endlessly revolving thoughts. Falcón brought him into his office, took another two aspirin and briefed him on the Vega deaths.

Pérez and Ferrera turned up just after 8 a.m. The other two squad members, Baena and Serrano, were out doing a door-to-door. Falcón decided to move on two fronts. He would conduct a house search at the Vega property while Ramírez made a start on Rafael Vega’s place of business, interviewing the project managers, the accountant and visiting all the construction sites. They would also have to work on finding the missing gardener, Sergei, and getting more information on the Russians seen by Pablo Ortega on La Noche de Reyes visiting the Vegas’ house.

‘Where do we look for Sergei?’ asked Pérez.

‘Well, you can find out if there are any Russians or Ukrainians working on Vega’s building sites and ask them, for a start. I doubt he’s unique.’

‘If we want to search Vega’s office, from what you’ve said about Vázquez, we’re going to need a warrant.’

‘And we won’t get one from a judge unless we can prove suspicious circumstances, for which we’ll have to wait until we get the autopsies,’ said Falcón. ‘I’m going to have to take someone from Lucía’s family down to the Instituto to identify the bodies. I’ll pick them up probably around midday and see if that scrap of photograph we found in the barbecue means anything to any of them.’

‘So until then we rely on the kindness of Sr Vázquez?’ said Ramírez.

‘He’s already told me to talk to the accountant and given me his details,’ said Falcón, who turned to Ferrera. ‘Did you get anything more on those number plates?’

‘What plates?’ asked Ramírez.

‘Somebody followed me home last night in a blue Seat Cordoba.’

‘Any ideas?’ asked Ramírez, while Ferrera called the traffic police.

‘Too early to say, but they didn’t seem too bothered by me or that I saw their plates.’

‘They were reported stolen off a VW Golf in Marbella,’ said Ferrera. ‘Nothing more.’

Falcón and Ferrera picked up the crime scene photographs from Felipe and Jorge and went down to the car. Cristina Ferrera always dressed as if she was about to disappear without trace. She never used make-up and had one piece of jewellery: a crucifix on a chain. Her face was wide and flat with a nose that calmed the traffic of freckles across it. She had watchful brown eyes that moved slowly in her head. She made no physical impact and yet she had a strong presence which had impressed Falcón in her interview. Ramírez had passed over her photograph on the grounds of looks alone, but Falcón’s curiosity was piqued. Why should an ex-nun want to become a member of a murder squad? Her prepared answer was that she wanted to be part of a group that was engaged on the side of Good against Evil. Ramírez had warned her that there was nothing theological about murder work, that in fact it was illogical – the result of breakdowns and short circuits in society – and nothing to do with chariot battles in heaven.

‘The Inspector Jefe was asking for my reasons as someone who’d been thinking of becoming a nun,’ she’d said, coolly. ‘It was my naïve belief then that the next best institution after the Church where I could do some good was the police force. My ten years on the streets of Cádiz have taught me that that is possible only on rare occasions.’

Falcón had wanted to give her the job there and then, but Ramírez wasn’t finished.

‘So why did you leave your vocation?’

‘I met a man, Inspector. I fell pregnant, we got married and had two children.’

‘In that order?’ asked Ramírez, and Ferrera had nodded without taking her brown eyes off him.

So, a fallen angel, too. A Bride of Christ who’d found herself more mortal boots. Falcón had made his decision. The transfer from Cádiz had been slow but the few days she’d been with his squad had convinced him that he’d made the right choice. Even Ramírez had taken her out for a coffee, but that was how things changed. Ramírez, with his daughter’s mystery illness, had found himself searching for spiritual sustenance rather than the corporeal version he usually hunted for amongst the courts’ secretaries, the bar flirts, shopgirls and even, so Falcón suspected, some of the hookers that crossed his path.

Ferrera drove. Falcón preferred to lose himself in vague thoughts that might lead to better ideas. They drove to Santa Clara in silence. Falcón liked her for that resistance to the Andaluz gene for talking non-stop. His thoughts moved in a slow sickly loop. How men were changed by crisis. Ramírez had gone to church. Falcón had never been attracted to it. It made him feel fraudulent. He, like Sr Vega, had gone to the river, whose draw, he had to admit, was not always positive. There had been times when it offered him an alternative solution and he’d had to pull back and rush home to the comfort of whisky.

They pulled up outside the Vegas’ house. Falcón used the remote to open the gates to the driveway. The air conditioning was still on in the house. He gave Ferrera a guided tour of the two crime scenes, the rest of the house and the garden with Sergei’s accommodation. He profiled the two victims as they progressed. They returned to the crime scenes and went through the police photographs. Falcón filled in what he knew about the lead up to the crisis, but did not particularly emphasize murder or suicide. He wanted Ferrera to look at the crime scenes from the point of view of a woman, to think herself into Lucía Vega’s mind by going through her effects and then relive her actions.

He went into Vega’s study and sat at the desk below the bullfight poster. The laptop had been removed and was in the lab. There was only the phone and the tape outline of the position of the laptop on the desk. He looked down the list of pre-programmed numbers on the phone. There were office numbers and Vázquez’s direct line as well as the Krugmans’ and Consuelo’s. The last number was void. He picked up the phone and pressed it.

‘Dá…zdrastvutye, Vasili,’ said a voice, clearly expecting someone else on the line.

‘Your telephone number has been selected in our grand draw,’ said Falcón. ‘I’m happy to inform you that you and your wife have won a prize. All you have to do is give me your name and address and I will tell you where to go to pick up your wonderful prize.’

‘Who are you?’ asked the voice in heavily accented Spanish.

‘Name and address first, please.’

A hand went over the receiver. Muffled voices came down the line.

‘What’s the prize?’

‘Name and –’

‘Tell me the prize,’ he said brutally.

‘It’s a watch for you and your –’

‘I’ve got a watch,’ he said, and slammed down the phone.

Falcón made a note to ask Vázquez about these Russians. The desk drawers revealed nothing unusual. The Heckler & Koch had been removed for tests. He opened up the filing cabinets with the keys he’d found the day before. He flicked through the files for telephone, bank, insurance. They were catching on something underneath – a leather-bound loose-leaf diary and address book.

The diary was private. The entries were minimal. Most of the time there was just an ‘X’ marked next to the hour and they were mostly night-time meetings. Falcón went back to Noche de Reyes and found that there was an ‘X’ marked there, too. The first daytime meeting was in March with ‘Dr A’. In June there were meetings with Dr A and another with Dr D. In the address section he found a list of doctors – Médicos Álvarez, Diego and Rodríguez. He flicked through the diary and found that Dr R was the last doctor to see Vega. He called and arranged to talk to him around midday.

He went through the address section of the book, which contained only names and telephone numbers. Raúl Jiménez’s name was there but had been crossed out. As he turned the pages, names he knew leapt out at him. A lot of them he vaguely recalled from the Raúl Jiménez murder investigation – people from the town hall and public works. There was one name though that really took him back to that turbulent time – Eduardo Carvajal. Again it had been crossed out. Like Raúl Jiménez, he was dead. Falcón had never found what linked the two men. All he’d discovered was that Jiménez had rewarded Carvajal via a fake consultancy company during Expo ‘92 and, at the time of his death in a car crash in 1998 on the Costa del Sol, Carvajal was about to face trial on charges relating to a paedophile ring.

Ortega’s name was also in the book and the last name to stand out was one that had him pacing around the house, reminding himself that there was no art on the walls of any significance. Ramón Salgado, who had been one of Seville’s best-known art dealers, was also in the book, crossed out. Maybe Vega Construcciones had invested in art or bought a piece for their head-quarters, but there was also that disturbing memory of the child pornography they’d discovered on Salgado’s hard disk after his brutal murder. In these circles everybody knew each other, links in a golden chain of wealth and influence. Another question for Vázquez.

There were no Russian names in the book. He put it back in the filing cabinet. He moved on to another cabinet which contained box files full of blueprints and photographs of buildings. In the bottom drawer of the third cabinet there was a box file with no reference number. It said simply Justicia. In the file there were pages, mostly in English and mostly from this year, which had been extracted from the internet on a range of subjects but primarily concerned with an international system of justice. There were also newspaper articles on the International Criminal Court, the Tribunal that it was designed to replace, the crusading Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón and also the intricacies and possibilities within the Belgian legal system for bringing international war criminals to justice.

The doorbell sounded in the hall. He locked up the cabinet and went to answer it. Sra Krugman was wearing a black linen top and a skirt, bias-cut, with a scarlet silk sash hanging down the side. On the end of her long white arm was a plastic thermos jug.

‘I thought you might like some coffee, Inspector Jefe,’ she said. ‘Spanish strength. None of your American sock water here.’

‘I thought there’d been a coffee revolution in America,’ he said, thinking other things.

‘The levels of penetration have been uneven,’ she said. ‘It cannot be guaranteed.’

He let her pass, closed the door to the grotesque heat. He didn’t want this intrusion. Maddy fetched cups and saucers. He shouted upstairs to Ferrera but she didn’t want any coffee. They went into Vega’s office and sat at the desk. Maddy smoked and flicked ash into her saucer. She made no attempt at conversation. Her physical, or rather, sexual presence filled the room. Falcón still felt nauseous and he had nothing to say to her. His mind raced as he drank the coffee.

‘Do you like bullfights?’ she asked, looking above his head just as the silence had reached screaming point.

‘I used to go a lot,’ he said, ‘but I haven’t been since…for well over a year now.’

‘Marty wouldn’t take me,’ she said, ‘so I asked Rafael. We went on several occasions. I didn’t understand it, but I liked it.’

‘A lot of foreigners don’t,’ said Falcón.

‘I was surprised,’ she said, ‘at how quickly the violence became tolerable. When I saw the first picador’s lance go in I didn’t think I’d be able to take it. But, you know, it sharpens your sight. You don’t realize how soft focus everyday life is until you’ve been to a bullfight. Everything stands out. Everything is defined. It’s as if the sight of blood and the prospect of death wakes up in us something atavistic. I found myself tuning into a different level of awareness, or rather an old one, that the boredom in our lives has gradually smothered. By the third bull I was quite used to it, the brilliance of the blood welling up from a particularly deep lance wound and cascading down the bull’s foreleg wasn’t just bearable but electrifying. We must be hard-wired for violence and death, don’t you think, Inspector Jefe?’

‘I remember a sort of ritualistic thrill on the faces of the Moroccans in Tangier when they killed a sheep for the festival of Aid el Kebir,’ said Falcón.

‘Bullfighting must be an extension of that,’ she said. ‘There’s ritual, theatre, thrills…but there’s something else, too. Passion, for instance and, of course…sex.’

‘Sex?’ he said, the whisky lurching in his stomach.

‘Those beautiful guys in their tight costumes performing so gracefully with every muscle in their bodies, in the face of terrible danger…possible death. That is the ultimate in sexiness, don’t you think?’

‘That’s not the way I see it.’

‘How do you see it?’

‘I go to see the bulls,’ said Falcón. ‘The bull is always the central figure. It’s his tragedy and the greater his nobility the finer his tragedy will be. The torero is there to shape the performance, to bring out the bull’s noble qualities and in the end to dispatch him and give us, the audience, our catharsis.’

‘You can tell I’m an American,’ she said.

‘That’s not how everybody sees it,’ said Falcón. ‘Some toreros believe that they are there to dominate the bull, even to humiliate it and showcase their masculine prowess in the process.’

‘I’ve seen that,’ she said, ‘when they thrust their genitals at the bull.’

‘Ye-e-s,’ said Falcón nervously. ‘Quite often the spectacle is a travesty, even in the best arenas. There have been Ladies Only nights and other…’

‘Decadence?’ said Maddy, filling in.

‘Greek tragedy is quite rare these days,’ said Falcón, ‘whereas soap opera isn’t.’

‘So how are we supposed to keep ourselves noble in such a world?’

‘You have to concentrate on the big things,’ said Falcón. ‘Like Love. Compassion. Honour…that sort of stuff.’

‘It sounds almost medieval now,’ she said.

Silence. He heard Ferrera leave the house. She walked in front of the study window.

‘You said something to me yesterday in English?’ he said, wanting to get rid of her now.

‘I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘Did it make you angry?’

‘Lighten up. You told me to lighten up.’

‘Yes, well, today’s a different day,’ she said. ‘I read your story on the internet last night.’

‘Is that why you’ve come over this morning?’

‘I’m not here to scavenge – whatever you might think of my photographs.’

‘I thought the stories of your subjects, the causes of their internal struggle, were not your concern.’

‘This isn’t about my work.’

‘Unfortunately this is about mine. I have to get on, Sra Krugman. So, if you’ll excuse me…’ he said.

The front doorbell rang. He went to open it.

‘I locked myself out, Inspector Jefe,’ said Ferrera.

Maddy Krugman sauntered out between them. Ferrera followed Falcón to the study where he sat back in the chair.

‘Tell me,’ he said, staring out of the window, wondering what Maddy Krugman was after.

‘Sra Vega was a manic depressive,’ said Ferrera.

‘We know she had trouble sleeping.’

‘There’s quite a range of drugs in his bedside table.’

‘That was locked, as I remember, and the keys are here.’

‘Lithium, for instance,’ said Ferrera. ‘He was probably handing the drugs out to her…or so he thought. I found a duplicate key in her wardrobe, along with a secret stash of eighteen sleeping pills. There’s plenty of evidence of obsessive-compulsive behaviour in there, too. I also found a lot of chocolate in the fridge and more ice cream in the freezer than a small child could possibly eat.’

‘What about her relationship with her husband?’

‘I doubt they were having sex, given her condition and the fact that he was handing out the drugs to her,’ said Ferrera. ‘He was probably getting his sex from elsewhere…but that didn’t stop her buying an extensive range of sexy underwear.’

‘What about the child?’

‘She had a picture of her and the child just after the birth on her bedside table. She looks fantastic – radiant, beautiful and proud. I think it’s a photograph she looked at a lot. It reminded her of the woman she used to be.’

‘Postnatal depression?’

‘Could be,’ said Ferrera. ‘She didn’t go out much. There’s stacks of mail-order catalogues under the bed.’

‘She let the child sleep over at a neighbour’s house quite often.’

‘Difficult to cope when your life runs away from you like that,’ said Ferrera, her eyes dropping to the lipstick-smeared coffee cup. ‘Was she that neighbour?’

‘No, another one,’ said Falcón, shaking his head.

‘She didn’t look the mothering type.’

‘So what do you think happened here?’ asked Falcón.

‘There’s enough despair in this house to lead you to believe that having decided to kill himself he would have had to kill her to put her out of her misery.’

‘Why did he dislocate her jaw?’

‘To knock her out?’

‘Doesn’t that seem too violent? She was probably groggy with sleep anyway.’

‘Perhaps he did it as a way of finding the violence in himself,’ said Ferrera.

‘Or perhaps she heard the death agonies of her husband and surprised the murderer, who then had to deal with her,’ said Falcón.

‘Where’s the pad Sr Vega wrote his note on?’

‘Good question. It hasn’t been found. But it’s possible that it was an old piece of paper he had in his dressing-gown pocket.’

‘Who bought the drain cleaner?’

‘Not the maid,’ said Falcón.

‘Do we know when it was bought?’

‘Not yet, but if it was from a supermarket it won’t be much help.’

‘It looks as if Sra Vega was on her own that night, indulging herself as usual,’ said Ferrera. ‘She spends a lot of time on her own and she’s well prepared for it.’

‘You’re always on your own with mental illness,’ said Falcón.

‘She has a box of her favourite videos and DVDs. All romantic stuff. There’s a DVD still in the machine. She gets the call from her neighbour so the child is taken care of. She has no responsibilities. When did her husband get home?’

‘I’m told it was normally quite late…around midnight.’

‘That would fit: put off coming home to the despair for as long as possible,’ said Ferrera. ‘Sra Vega probably didn’t like seeing him anyway. She heard the car…or maybe not through these windows. So she more likely heard him come into the house from the garage. She turned off the DVD and ran upstairs leaving her slippers. He eventually joined her in bed, or at least…’

‘How do you know he joined her? His pillow was undented in the crime scene shots.’

‘But the sheets and covers were pulled out…so he might have been about to join her…’

‘And then been distracted by something else.’

‘Do we know from the phone company if there were any more calls after the neighbour rang about the child?’

‘Not yet. You can work on that when we get back.’

‘The only other oddity I’ve come across is that in the crime scene photographs he’s got his watch on with the face on the outside of his wrist, but in the photos I’ve seen elsewhere in the house he always wore it with the face on the underside of his wrist.’

‘What do you conclude from that?’

‘It either worked its way round in his struggle with himself or an assailant,’ said Ferrera, ‘or the watch has come off and been put back on his wrist by somebody who doesn’t know how he wears it.’

‘Why would someone want to do that?’

‘Well…if it came off as a result of a struggle with an assailant whose ultimate aim was to make this look like a suicide it would be less indicative of another person’s presence if the watch was on his wrist rather than on the floor.’

‘What sort of a strap did his watch have?’

‘It seems to be a metal bracelet type, which can come off easily in a struggle or just as easily work its way round a wrist, so…’

‘Whatever…that was a good piece of observation,’ said Falcón. ‘It might not help us form a case for murder, but it is indicative of the strange circumstances of the crime scene. Now all we’ve got to do is find the incontrovertible proof that will convince Juez Calderón that we have a case. We know Sr Vega was burning things at the bottom of the garden. What does that imply to you?’

‘He was getting rid of things in preparation for something.’

‘They were personal things, letters and photographs, and they caused him great distress.’

‘So he didn’t want them discovered. He was hiding them and now…’

‘If you were Sr Vega and you wanted to hide something, where would you put it?’

‘In my territory – either here in my study or in the butcher’s room.’

‘I’ve searched the study,’ said Falcón.

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