The Hidden Assassins
ROBERT WILSON

For Jane and my mother and Bindy, Simon and Abigail

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

‘The Second Coming’ W.B. YEATS

And now, what will become of us without the barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ CONSTANTINE CAVAFY

Prologue

The West End, London—Thursday, 9th March 2006

‘So, how’s your new job going?’ asked Najib.

‘I work for this woman,’ said Mouna. ‘She’s called Amanda Turner. She’s not even thirty and she’s already an account director. You know what I do for her? I book her holidays. That’s what I’ve been doing all week.’

‘Is she going somewhere nice?’

Mouna laughed. She loved Najib. He was so quiet and not of this world. Meeting him was like coming across a palmerie in the desert.

‘Can you believe this?’ she said. ‘She’s going on a pilgrimage.’

‘I didn’t know English people went on pilgrimages.’

Mouna was, in fact, very impressed by Amanda Turner, but she was much keener to receive Najib’s approbation.

‘Well, it’s not exactly religious. I mean, the reason she’s going isn’t.’

‘Where is this pilgrimage?’

‘It’s in Spain near Seville. It’s called La Romería del Rocío,’ said Mouna. ‘Every year people from all over Andalucía gather together in this little village called El Rocío. On something called the Pentecost Monday, they bring out the Virgin from the church and everybody goes wild, dancing and feasting, as far as I can tell.’

‘I don’t get it,’ said Najib.

‘Nor do I. But I can tell you the reason Amanda’s going is not for the parading of the Virgin,’ said Mouna. ‘She’s going because it’s one big party for four days—drinking, dancing, singing—you know what English people are like.’

Najib nodded. He knew what they were like.

‘So why has it taken you all week?’ he asked.

‘Because the whole of Seville is completely booked up and Amanda has loads, I mean loads, of requirements. The four rooms have all got to be together…’

‘Four rooms?’

‘She’s going with her boyfriend, Jim “Fat Cat” Maitland,’ said Mouna. ‘Then there’s her sister and her boyfriend and two other couples. The guys all work in the same company as Jim—Kraus, Maitland, Powers.’

‘What does Jim do in his company?’

‘It’s a hedge fund. Don’t ask me what that means,’ said Mouna. ‘All I know is that it’s in the building they call the Gherkin and…guess how much money he made last year?’

Najib shook his head. He made very little money. So little it wasn’t important to him.

‘Eight million pounds?’ said Mouna, dangling it as a question.

‘How much did you say?’

‘I know. You can’t believe it, can you? The lowest paid guy in Jim’s company made five million last year.’

‘I can see why they would have a lot of requirements,’ said Najib, sipping his black tea.

‘The rooms have all got to be together. They want to stay a night before the pilgrimage, and then three nights after, and then a night in Granada, and then come back to Seville for another two nights. And there’s got to be a garage, because Jim won’t park his Porsche Cayenne in the street,’ said Mouna. ‘Do you know what a Porsche Cayenne is, Najib?’

‘A car?’ said Najib, scratching himself through his beard.

‘I’ll tell you what Amanda calls it: Jim’s Big Fuck Off to Global Warming.’

Najib winced at her language and she wished she hadn’t been so eager to impress.

‘It’s a four-wheel drive,’ said Mouna, quickly, ‘which goes a hundred and fifty-six miles an hour. Amanda says you can watch the fuel gauge going down when Jim hits a hundred. And you know, they’re taking four cars. They could easily fit in two, but they have to take four. I mean, these people, Najib, you cannot believe it.’

‘Oh, I think I can, Mouna,’ said Najib. ‘I think I can.’

The City of London—Thursday, 23rd March 2006

He stood across the street from the entrance to the underground car park. His face was indiscernible beyond the greasy, fake fur-lined rim of the green parka’s hood. He walked backwards and forwards, hands shoved deep down into his pockets. One of his trainers was coming apart and the lace of the other dragged and flapped about the sodden frayed bottom of his faded jeans, which seemed to suck on the wet pavement. He was muttering.

He could have been any one of the hundreds of unseen people drawn to the city to live at ankle height in underground passages, to scuff around on cardboard sheets in shop doorways, to drift like lost souls in the limbo of purgatory amongst the living and the visible, with their real lives and jobs and credit on their cards and futures in every conceivable commodity, including time.

Except that he was being seen, as we are all being seen, as we have all become walkers-on with bit parts in the endlessly tedious movie of everyday life. Often in the early mornings he was the star of this grainy black-and-white documentary, with barely an extra in sight and only the sporty traffic of the early traders and Far East fund managers providing any action. Later, as the sandwich shops opened and the streets filled with bankers, brokers and analysts, his role reverted to ‘local colour’ and he would often be lost in the date or the flickering numbers of time running past.

Like all CCTV actors, his talent was completely missable, his Reality TV potential would remain undiscovered unless, for some reason, it was perceived that his part was crucial, and the editor of everyday life suddenly realized that he had occupied the moment when the little girl was last seen, or the young lad was led away or, as so often happens in the movies, briefcases were exchanged.

There was none of that excitement here.

The solitary male or female (under the hood not even that was clear) moved in the tide of extras, sometimes with them, sometimes against. He was extra to the extras and, worse than superfluous, he was getting in the way. He did this for hour after hour, week after week, month after…He was only there for a month. For four weeks he muttered and shuffled across the cracks in the pavement opposite the underground car park and then he was gone. Reality TV rolled on without him, without ever realizing that a star of the silent screen had been in its eye for just over 360 hours.

Had there been a soundtrack it would not have helped. Even if a mike had been placed within the horrible greasy hood of the parka it would have clarified nothing. All that would have registered was the mutterings of a marginalized moron, telling himself the colour, model and registration number of apparently random cars and the time they passed his patch of pavement. It was surely the obsessive work of a lunatic.

What sort of sophisticated surveillance equipment would have been able to pick up that the eyes deep inside the darkness of the hood were only choosing cars that went into the underground car park of the building across the street? And even if there was equipment that could have made that connection, would it also have been able to discover that the stream of uninteresting data was being recorded on to the hard disk of a palm-sized dictaphone in the inside pocket of the parka?

Only then would the significance of this superfluous human being have been realized and the editor of everyday life, if he was being attentive that morning, might have sat up in his chair and thought: Here we have a star in the making.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologues

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

Coda

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for The Hidden Assassins:

Also by Robert Wilson

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

Seville—Monday, 5th June 2006, 16.00 hrs

Dead bodies are never pretty. Even the most talented undertaker with a genius for maquillage cannot bring the animation of life back to a corpse. But some dead bodies are uglier than others. They have been taken over by another life form. Bacteria have turned their juices and excretions into noxious gas, which slithers along the body’s cavities and under the skin, until it’s drum tight over the corruption within. The stench is so powerful it enters the central nervous system of the living and their revulsion reaches beyond the perimeter of their being. They become edgy. It’s best not to stand too close to people around a ‘bloater’.

Normally Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón had a mantra, which he played in the back of his mind when confronted by this sort of corpse. He could stomach all manner of violence done to bodies—gunshot craters, knife gashes, bludgeon dents, strangulation bruises, poisoned pallor—but this transformation by corruption, the bloat and stink, had recently begun to disturb him. He thought it might just be the psychology of decadence, the mind troubled by the slide to the only possible end of age; except that this wasn’t the ordinary decay of death. It was to do with the corruption of the body—the heat’s rapid transformation of a slim girl into a stout middle-aged matron or, as in the case of this body that they were excavating from the rubbish of the landfill site beyond the outskirts of the city, the metamorphosis of an ordinary man to the taut girth of a sumo wrestler.

The body had stiffened with rigor mortis and had come to rest in the most degrading position. Worse than a defeated sumo wrestler tipped from the ring to land head first in the front row of the baying crowd, his modesty protected by the thick strap of his mawashi, this man was naked. Had he been clothed he might have been kneeling as a Muslim supplicant (his head even pointed east), but he wasn’t. And so he looked like someone preparing himself for bestial violation, his face pressed into the bed of decay underneath him, as if unable to bear the shame of this ultimate defilement.

As he took in the scene Falcón realized that he wasn’t playing his usual mantra and that his mind was occupied by what had happened to him as he’d taken the call alerting him to the discovery of the body. To escape the noise in the café where he’d been drinking his café solo, he’d backed out through the door and collided with a woman. They’d said ‘Perdón’, exchanged a startled look and then been transfixed. The woman was Consuelo Jiménez. In the four years since their affair Falcón had only had a glimpse of her four or five times in crowded streets or shops and now he’d bumped into her. They said nothing. She didn’t go into the café after all, but disappeared quickly back into the stream of shoppers. She had, however, left her imprint on him and the closed shrine in his mind devoted to her had been reopened.

Earlier the Médico Forense had stepped carefully through the rubbish to confirm that the man was dead. Now the forensics were concluding their work, bagging anything of interest and removing it from the scene. The Médico Forense, still masked up and dressed in a white boiler suit, paid his second visit to the victim. His eyes searched and narrowed at what they found. He made notes and walked over to where Falcón was standing with the duty judge, Juez Juan Romero.

‘I can’t see any obvious cause of death,’ he said. ‘He didn’t die from having his hands cut off. That was done afterwards. His wrists have been very tightly tourniqueted. There are no contusions around the neck and no bullet holes or knife wounds. He’s been scalped and I can’t see any catastrophic damage to the skull. He might have been poisoned, but I can’t tell from his face, which has been burnt off with acid. Time of death looks to be around forty-eight hours ago.’

Juez Romero’s dark brown eyes blinked over his face mask at each devastating revelation. He hadn’t handled a murder investigation for more than two years and he wasn’t used to this level of brutality in the few murders that had come his way.

‘They didn’t want him recognized, did they?’ said Falcón. ‘Any distinguishing marks on the rest of the body?’

‘Let me get him back to the lab and cleaned up. He’s covered in filth.’

‘What about other body damage?’ asked Falcón. ‘He must have arrived in the back of a refuse truck to end up here. There should be some marks.’

‘Not that I can see. There might be abrasions under the filth and I’ll pick up any fractures and ruptured organs back at the Forensic Institute once I’ve opened him up.’

Falcón nodded. Juez Romero signed off the levantamiento del cadáver and the paramedics moved in and thought about how they were going to manipulate a stiffened corpse in this position into a body bag and on to the stretcher. Farce crept into the tragedy of the scene. They wanted to cause as little disturbance as possible to the body’s noxious gases. In the end they opened up the body bag on the stretcher and lifted him, still prostrate, and placed him on top. They tucked his wrist stumps and feet into the bag and zipped it up over his raised buttocks. They carried the tented structure to the ambulance, watched by a gang of municipal workers, who’d gathered to see the last moments of the drama. They all laughed and turned away as one of their number said something about ‘taking it up the arse for eternity’.

Tragedy, farce and now vulgarity, thought Falcón.

The forensics completed their search of the area immediately around the body and brought their bagged exhibits over to Falcón.

‘We’ve got some addresses on envelopes found close to the body,’ said Felipe. ‘Three have got the same street names. It should help you to find where he was dumped. We reckon that’s how he ended up in that body position, from lying foetally in the bottom of a bin.’

‘We’re also pretty sure he was wrapped in this—’ said Jorge, holding up a large plastic bag stuffed with a grimy white sheet. ‘There’s traces of blood from his severed hands. We’ll match it up later…’

‘He was naked when I first saw him,’ said Falcón.

‘There was some loose stitching which we assume got ripped open in the refuse truck,’ said Jorge. ‘The sheet was snagged on one of the stumps of his wrists.’

‘The Médico Forense said the wrists were well tourniqueted and the hands removed after death.’

‘They were neatly severed, too,’ said Jorge. ‘No hack job—surgical precision.’

‘Any decent butcher could have done it,’ said Felipe. ‘But the face burnt off with acid and scalped…What do you make of that, Inspector Jefe?’

‘There must have been something special about him, to go to that trouble,’ said Falcón. ‘What’s in the bin liner?’

‘Some gardening detritus,’ said Jorge. ‘We think it had been dumped in the bin to cover the body.’

‘We’re going to do a wider search of the area now,’ said Felipe. ‘Pérez spoke to the guy operating the digger, who found the body, and there was some talk of a black plastic sheet. They might have done their post-mortem surgery on it, sewed him up in the shroud, wrapped him in the plastic and then dumped him.’

‘And you know how much we love black plastic for prints,’ said Jorge.

Falcón noted the addresses on the envelopes and they split up. He went back to his car, stripping off his face mask. His olfactory organ hadn’t tired sufficiently for the stink of urban waste not to lodge itself in his throat. The insistent grinding of the diggers drowned out the cawing of the scavenging birds, wheeling darkly against the white sky. This was a sad place even for an insentient corpse to end up.

Sub-Inspector Emilio Pérez was sitting on the back of a patrol car chatting to another member of the homicide squad, the ex-nun Cristina Ferrera. Pérez, who was well built with the dark good looks of a 1930s matinée idol, seemed to be of a different species to the small, blonde and rather plain young woman who’d joined the homicide squad from Cádiz four years ago. But, whereas Pérez had a tendency to be bovine in both demeanour and mentality, Ferrera was quick, intuitive and unrelenting. Falcón gave them the addresses from the envelopes, listing the questions he wanted asked, and Ferrera repeated them back before he could finish.

‘They sewed him into a shroud,’ he said to Cristina Ferrera as she went for the car. ‘They carefully removed his hands, burnt his face off, scalped him, but sewed him into a shroud.’

‘I suppose they think they’ve shown him some sort of respect,’ said Ferrera. ‘Like they do at sea, or for burial in mass graves after a disaster.’

‘Respect,’ said Falcón. ‘Right after they’ve shown him the ultimate disrespect by taking his life and his identity. There’s something ritualistic and ruthless about this, don’t you think?’

‘Perhaps they were religious,’ said Ferrera, raising an ironic eyebrow. ‘You know, a lot of terrible things have been done in God’s name, Inspector Jefe.’

Falcón drove back into the centre of Seville in strange yellowing light as a huge storm cloud, which had been gathering over the Sierra de Aracena, began to encroach on the city from the northwest. The radio told him that there would be an evening of heavy rain. It was probably going to be the last rain before the long hot summer.

At first he thought that it might be the physical and mental jolt he’d had from colliding with Consuelo that morning which was making him feel anxious. Or was it the change in the atmospheric pressure, or some residual edginess left from seeing the bloated corpse on the dump? As he sat at the traffic lights he realized that it ran deeper than all that. His instinct was telling him that this was the end of an old order and the ominous start of something new. The unidentifiable corpse was like a neurosis; an ugly protrusion prodding the consciousness of the city from a greater horror underneath. It was the sense of that greater horror, with its potential to turn minds, move spirits and change lives that he was finding so disturbing.

By the time he arrived back at the Jefatura, after a series of meetings with judges in the Edificio de los Juzgados, it was seven o’clock and evening seemed to have come early. The smell of rain was as heavy as metal in the ionized air. The thunder still seemed to be a long way off, but the sky was darkening to a premature night and flashes of lightning startled, like death just missed.

Pérez and Ferrera were waiting for him in his office. Their eyes followed him as he went to the window and the first heavy drops of rain rapped against the glass. Contentment was a strange human state, he thought, as a light steam rose from the car park. Just at the moment life seemed boring and the desire for change emerged like a brilliant idea, along came a new, sinister vitality and the mind was suddenly scrambling back to what appeared to be prelapsarian bliss.

‘What have you got?’ he asked, moving along the window to his desk and collapsing in the chair.

‘You didn’t give us a time of death,’ said Ferrera.

‘Sorry. Forty-eight hours was the estimate.’

‘We found the bins where the envelopes were dumped. They’re in the old city centre, on the corner of a cul-de-sac and Calle Boteros, between the Plaza de la Alfalfa and the Plaza Cristo de Burgos.’

‘When do they empty those bins?’

‘Every night between eleven and midnight,’ said Pérez.

‘So if, as the Médico Forense says, he died some time in the evening of Saturday 3rd June,’ said Ferrera, ‘they probably wouldn’t have been able to dump the body until three in the morning on Sunday.’

‘Where are those bins now?’

‘We’ve had them sent down to forensics to test for blood traces.’

‘But we might be out of luck there,’ said Pérez. ‘Felipe and Jorge have found some black plastic sheeting, which they think was wrapped around the body.’

‘Did any of the people you spoke to at the addresses on the envelopes remember seeing any black plastic sheeting in the bottom of one of the bins?’

‘We didn’t know about the black plastic sheeting when we interviewed them.’

‘Of course you didn’t,’ said Falcón, his brain not concentrated on the details, still drifting about in his earlier unease. ‘Why do you think the body was dumped at three in the morning?’

‘Saturday night near the Alfalfa…you know what it’s like around there…all the kids in the bars and out on the streets.’

‘Why choose those bins, if it’s so busy?’

‘Maybe they know those bins,’ said Pérez. ‘They knew that they could park down a dark, quiet cul-de-sac and what the collection times were. They could plan. Dumping the body would only take a few seconds.’

‘Any apartments overlooking the bins?’

‘We’ll go around the apartments in the cul-de-sac again tomorrow,’ said Pérez. ‘The apartment with the best view is at the end, but there was nobody at home.’

A long, pulsating flash of lightning was accompanied by a clap of thunder so loud that it seemed to crack open the sky above their heads. They all instinctively ducked and the Jefatura was plunged into darkness. They fumbled around for a torch, while the rain thrashed against the building and drove in waves across the car park. Ferrera propped a flashlight up against some files and they sat back. More lightning left them blinking, with the window frame burnt on to their retinae. The emergency generators started up in the basement. The lights flickered back on. Falcón’s mobile vibrated on the desktop: a text from the Médico Forense telling him that the autopsy had been completed and he would be free from 8.30 a.m. to discuss it. Falcón sent a text back agreeing to see him first thing. He flung the mobile back on the desk and stared into the wall.

‘You seem a little uneasy, Inspector Jefe,’ said Pérez, who had a habit of stating the obvious, while Falcón had a habit of ignoring him.

‘We have an unidentified corpse, which could prove to be unidentifiable,’ said Falcón, marshalling his thoughts, trying to give Pérez and Ferrera a focus for their investigative work. ‘How many people do you think were involved in this murder?’

‘A minimum of two,’ said Ferrera.

‘Killing, scalping, severing hands, burning off features with acid…yes, why did they cut off his hands when they could have easily burnt off his prints with acid?’

‘Something significant about his hands,’ said Pérez.

Falcón and Ferrera exchanged a look.

‘Keep thinking, Emilio,’ said Falcón. ‘Anyway, it was planned and premeditated and it was important that his identity was not known. Why?’

‘Because the identity of the corpse will point to the killers,’ said Pérez. ‘Most victims are killed by people—’

‘Or?’ said Falcón. ‘If there was no obvious link?’

‘The identity of the victim and/or knowledge of his skills might jeopardize a future operation,’ said Ferrera.

‘Good. Now tell me how many people you really think it took to dispose of that body in one of those bins,’ said Falcón. ‘They’re chest high to a normal person and the whole thing has got to be done in seconds.’

‘Three to deal with the body and two for lookout,’ said Pérez.

‘If you tipped the bin over to the edge of the car boot it could be done with two men,’ said Ferrera. ‘Anybody coming down Calle Boteros at that time would be drunk and shouting. You might need a driver in the car. Three maximum.’

‘Three or five, what does that tell you?’

‘It’s a gang,’ said Pérez.

‘Doing what?’

‘Drugs?’ he said. ‘Cutting off his hands, burning off his face…’

‘Drug runners don’t normally sew people into shrouds,’ said Falcón. ‘They tend to shoot people and there was no bullet hole…not even a knife wound.’

‘It didn’t seem like an execution,’ said Ferrera, ‘more like a regrettable necessity.’

Falcón told them they were to revisit all the apartments overlooking the bins first thing in the morning before everybody went to work. They were to establish if there was black plastic sheeting in any of the bins and if a car was seen or heard at around three in the morning on Sunday.

Down in the forensic lab, Felipe and Jorge had the tables pushed back and the black plastic sheet laid out on the floor. The two large bins from Calle Boteros were already in the corner, taped shut. Jorge was at a microscope while Felipe was on all fours on the plastic sheet, wearing his custom-made magnifying spectacles.

‘We’ve got a blood group match from the victim to the white shroud and to the black plastic sheet. We hope to have a DNA match by tomorrow morning,’ said Jorge. ‘It looks to me as if they put him face down on the plastic to do the surgery.’ He gave Falcón the measurements between a saliva deposit and some blood deposits and two pubic hairs which all conformed to the victim’s height.

‘We’re running DNA tests on those, too,’ he said.

‘What about the acid on the face?’

‘That must have been done elsewhere and rinsed off. There’s no sign of it.’

‘Any prints?’

‘No fingerprints, just a footprint in the top left quadrant,’ said Felipe. ‘Jorge has matched it to a Nike trainer, as worn by thousands of people.’

‘Are you going to be able to look at those bins tonight?’

‘We’ll take a look, but if he was well wrapped up I don’t hold out much hope for blood or saliva,’ said Felipe.

‘Have you run a check on missing persons?’ asked Jorge.

‘We don’t even know if he was Spanish yet,’ said Falcón. ‘I’m seeing the Médico Forense tomorrow morning. Let’s hope there are some distinguishing marks.’

‘His pubic hair was dark,’ said Jorge, grinning. ‘And his blood group was O positive…if that’s any help?’

‘Keep up the brilliant work,’ said Falcón.

It was still raining, but in a discouragingly sensible way after the reckless madness of the initial downpour. Falcón did some paperwork with his mind elsewhere. He turned away from his computer and stared at the reflection of his office in the dark window. The fluorescent light shivered. Pellets of rain drummed against the glass as if a lunatic wanted to attract his attention. Falcón was surprised at himself. He’d been such a scientific investigator in the past, always keen to get his hands on autopsy reports and forensic evidence. Now he spent more time tuning in to his intuition. He tried to persuade himself that it was experience but sometimes it seemed like laziness. A buzz from his mobile jolted him: a text from his current girlfriend, Laura, inviting him to dinner. He looked down at the screen and found himself unconsciously rubbing the arm which had made contact with Consuelo’s body in the entrance of the café. He hesitated as he reached for the mobile to reply. Why, suddenly, was everything so much more complicated? He’d wait until he got back home.

The traffic was slow in the rain. The radio news commented on the successful parading of the Virgin of Rocío, which had taken place that day. Falcón crossed the river and joined the metal snake heading north. He sat at the traffic lights and scribbled a note without thinking before filtering right down Calle Reyes Católicos. From there he drove into the maze of streets where he lived in the massive, rambling house he’d inherited six years ago. He parked up between the orange trees that led to the entrance of the house on Calle Bailén but didn’t get out. He was wrestling with his uneasiness again and this time it was to do with Consuelo—what he’d seen in her face that morning. They’d both been startled, but it hadn’t just been shock that had registered in her eyes. It was anguish.

He got out of the car, opened the smaller door within the brass-studded oak portal and went through to the patio, where the marble flags still glistened from the rain. A blinking light beyond the glass door to his study told him that he had two phone messages. He hit the button and stood in the dark looking out through the cloister at the bronze running boy in the fountain. The voice of his Moroccan friend, Yacoub Diouri, filled the room. He greeted Javier in Arabic and then slipped into perfect Spanish. He was flying to Madrid on his way to Paris next weekend and wondered if they could meet up. Was that coincidence or synchronicity? The only reason he’d met Yacoub Diouri, one of the few men he’d become close to, was because of Consuelo Jiménez. That was the thing about intuition, you began to believe that everything had significance.

The second message was from Laura, who still wanted to know if he would be coming for dinner that night; it would be just the two of them. He smiled at that. His relationship with Laura was not exclusive. She had other male companions she saw regularly and that had suited him…until now when, for no apparent reason, it was different. Paella and spending the night with Laura suddenly seemed ridiculous.

He called her and said that he wouldn’t be able to make dinner but that he would drop by for a drink later.

There was no food in the house. His housekeeper had assumed he would go out for dinner. He hadn’t eaten all day. The body on the dump had interrupted his lunch plans and ruined his appetite. Now he was hungry. He went for a walk. The streets were fresh after the rain and full of people. He didn’t really start thinking where he was going until he found himself heading round the back of the Omnium Sanctorum church. Only then did he admit that he was going to eat at Consuelo’s new restaurant.

The waiter brought him a menu and he ordered immediately. The pan de casa arrived quickly; thinly sliced ham sitting on a spread of salmorejo on toast. He enjoyed it with a beer. Feeling suddenly bold he took out one of his cards and wrote on the back: I am eating here and wondered if you would join me for a glass of wine. Javier. When the waiter came back with the revuelto de setas, scrambled eggs and mushrooms, he poured a glass of red rioja and Javier gave him the card.

Later the waiter returned with some tiny lamb chops and topped up his glass of wine.

‘She’s not in,’ he said. ‘I’ve left the card on her desk so that she knows you were here.’

Falcón knew he was lying. It was one of the few advantages of being a detective. He ate the chops feeling privately foolish that he’d believed in the synchronicity of the moment. He sipped at his third glass of wine and ordered coffee. By 10.40 p.m. he was out in the street again. He leaned against the wall opposite the entrance to the restaurant, thinking that he might catch her on the way out.

As he stood there waiting patiently he covered a lot of ground in his head. It was amazing how little thought he’d given to his inner life since he’d stopped seeing his shrink four years ago.

And when, an hour later, he gave up his vigil he knew precisely what he was going to do. He was determined to finish his superficial relationship with Laura and, if his world of work would let him, he would devote himself to bringing Consuelo back into his life.

2

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 02.00 hrs

Consuelo Jiménez was sitting in the office of her flagship restaurant, in the heart of La Macarena, the old working-class neighbourhood of Seville. She was in a state of heightened anxiety and the three heavy shots of The Macallan, which she’d taken to drinking at this time of night, were doing nothing to alleviate it. Her state had not been improved by bumping into Javier early in the day and it had been made worse by the knowledge that he’d been eating his dinner barely ten metres from where she was now sitting. His card lay on the desk in front of her.

She was in possession of a terrible clarity about her mental and physical state. She was not somebody who, having fallen into a trough of despair, lost control of her life and plunged unconsciously into an orgy of self-destruction. She was more meticulous than that, more detached. So detached that at times she’d found herself looking down on her own blonde head as the mind beneath stumbled about in the wreckage of her inner life. It was a very strange state to be in: physically in good shape for her age, mentally still very focused on her business, beautifully turned out as always, but…how to put this? She had no words for what was happening inside her. All she had to describe it was an image from a TV documentary on global warming: vital elements of an ancient glacier’s primitive structure had melted in some unusually fierce summer heat and, without warning, a vast tonnage of ice had collapsed in a protracted roar into a lake below. She knew, from the ghastly plummet in her own organs, that she was watching a pre-figurement of what might happen to her unless she did something fast.

The whisky glass travelled to her mouth and back to the desk, transported by a hand that she did not feel belonged to her. She was grateful for the ethereal sting of the alcohol because it reminded her that she was still sentient. She was playing with a business card, turning it over and over, rubbing the embossed name and profession with her thumb. Her manager knocked and came in.

‘We’re finished now,’ he said. ‘We’ll be locking up in five minutes. There’s nothing left to do here…you should go home.’

‘That man who was here earlier, one of the waiters said he was outside. Are you sure he’s gone?’

‘I’m sure,’ said the manager.

‘I’ll let myself out of the side door,’ she said, giving him one of her hard, professional looks.

He backed off. Consuelo was sorry. He was a good man, who knew when a person needed help and also when that help was unacceptable. What was going on inside Consuelo was too personal to be sorted out in an after-hours chat between proprietor and manager. This wasn’t about unpaid bills or difficult clients. This was about…everything.

She went back to the card. It belonged to a clinical psychologist called Alicia Aguado. Over the last eighteen months Consuelo had made six appointments with this woman and failed to turn up for any of them. She’d given a different name each time she’d made these appointments, but Alicia Aguado had recognized her voice from the first call. Of course she would. She was blind, and the blind develop other senses. On the last two occasions Alicia Aguado had said: ‘If ever you have to see me, you must call. I will fit you in whenever—early morning or late at night. You must realize that I am always here when you need me.’ That had shocked Consuelo. Alicia Aguado knew. Even Consuelo’s iciest professional tone had betrayed her need for help.

The hand reached for the bottle and refilled the glass. The whisky vaporized into her mind. She also knew why she wanted to see this particular psychologist: Alicia Aguado had treated Javier Falcón. When she’d run into him in the street, it had been like a reminder. But a reminder of what? The ‘fling’ she’d had with him? She only called it a fling because that’s what it looked like from the outside—some days of dinners and wild sex. But she’d broken it off because…She writhed in her chair at the memory. What reason had she given him? Because she was hopeless when in love? She turned into somebody else when she got into a relationship? Whatever it was, she’d invented something unanswerable, refused to see him or answer his calls. And now he was back like an extra motivation.

She hadn’t been able to ignore a recent and more worrying psychological development, which had started to occur in the brief moments when she wasn’t working with her usual fierce, almost manic, drive. When distracted or tired at the end of the day sex would come into her mind, but like a midnight intruder. She imagined herself having new and vital affairs with strangers. Her fantasies drifted towards rough, possibly dangerous men and assumed pornographic dimensions, with herself at the centre of almost unimaginable goings on. She’d always hated porn, had found it both disgustingly biological and boring, but now, however much she tried to fight it with her intelligence, she was aware of her arousal: saliva in her mouth, the constriction of her throat. And it was happening again, now, even with her mind apparently engaged. She kicked back her chair, tossed Aguado’s card into the gaping hole of her handbag, lunged at her cigarettes, lit up and paced the office floor, smoking too fast and hard.

These imaginings disgusted her. Why was she thinking about such trash? Why not think about her children? Her three darling boys—Ricardo, Matías and Darío—asleep at home in the care of a nanny. In the care of a nanny! She had promised that she would never do that. After Raúl, her husband, their father, had been murdered she had been determined to give them all her attention so that they would never feel the lack of a parent. And look at her now—thinking of fucking while they were at home in another person’s care. She didn’t deserve to be a mother. She tore her handbag off the desk. Javier’s card fluttered to the floor.

She wanted to be out in the open, breathing the rain-rinsed air. The five or six shots of The Macallan she’d drunk meant that she had to walk up to the Basilica Macarena to get a taxi. To do this she had to pass the Plaza del Pumarejo, where a bunch of drunks and addicts hung out all day, every day, and well into the night. The plaza, under a canopy of trees still dripping from the earlier storm, had a raised platform with a closed kiosk at one end and at the other, near the shuttered Bodega de Gamacho, a group of a dozen or so burntout cases.

The air was cool around Consuelo’s bare legs, which were numbed by the whisky. She had not considered how obtrusive her peach-coloured satin suit would be under the street lamps. She walked behind the kiosk and along the pavement by the old Palacio del Pumarejo. Some of the group were standing and boozing, gathered around a man who was talking, while others slumped on benches in a stupor.

The wiry central figure in a black shirt open to the waist was familiar to Consuelo. His talk to this unsavoury audience was more of an oration, because he had a politician’s way with words. He had long black hair, eyebrows angled sharply into his nose and a lean, hard, pockmarked face. She knew why the group around him hung on his words and it had nothing to do with the content. It was because under those satanic eyebrows he had very bright, light green eyes, which stared out of his dark face, alarming whoever they settled on. They gave the powerful impression of a man who had quick access to a blade. He drank from a bottle of cheap wine, which hung by his side with his forefinger plugged into its neck.

A month ago, while Consuelo was waiting to cross the road at a traffic light, he’d approached her from behind and muttered words of such obscenity that they’d entered her mind like a shiv. Consuelo had remonstrated loudly when it happened. But, unlike the usual perpetrators, who would slink off into the crowds of shoppers, ignoring her, he’d got up close and silenced her with those green eyes and a quick wink, that made her think he knew something about her that she, herself, did not.

‘I know your sort,’ he’d said, and touched the corner of his mouth with the point of his tongue.

His bravado had paralysed her vocal cords. That and the horrible little kiss he’d blown her, which found its way to her neck like a horsefly.

Consuelo, distracted by these memories, had slowed to a halt. A member of the group spotted her and jerked his head in her direction. The orator stepped towards the railing holding the bottle up, letting it dangle from his forefinger.

‘Fancy a drink?’ he said. ‘We haven’t got any glasses, but I’ll let you suck it off my finger if you want.’

A low, gurgling laugh came from the group, which included some women. Startled, Consuelo began walking again. The man jumped off the raised platform. The steel tips on the heels of his boots hammered the cobbles. He blocked her path and started to dance an extremely suggestive Sevillana, with much pelvic thrusting. The group backed him up with some flamenco clapping.

‘Come on, Doña Consuelo,’ he said. ‘Let’s see you move. You look as if you’ve got a decent pair of legs on you.’

She was shocked to hear him use her name. Terror slashed through her insides, tugging something strangely exciting behind it. Muscles quivered in the backs of her thighs. Disparate thoughts barged into each other in her mind. Why the hell had she put herself in such a position? She wondered how rough his hands would be. He looked strong—potentially violent.

The sheer perversity of these thoughts jolted her back to the reality. She had to get away from him. She veered off down a side street, walking as fast as her kitten heels would permit on the cobbles. He was behind her, steel tips leisurely clicking.

‘Fucking hell, Doña Consuelo, I only asked you for a dance,’ he shouted after her, a mocking inflexion on her title. ‘Now you’re leading me astray down this dark alley. For God’s sake, have some self-respect, woman. Don’t go showing your eagerness so early on. We’ve barely met, we haven’t even danced.’

Consuelo kept going, breathing fast. All she had to do was get to the end of the street, turn left and she’d be at the gates of the old city and there would be traffic and people…a taxi back to her real life at home in Santa Clara. An alley appeared on her left, she saw the lights of the main road through the buildings leaning into each other. She darted down it. Shit, the cobbles were wet and all over the place. It was too dark and her heels were slipping. She wanted to scream when his hand finally landed on her shoulder, but it was like in those dreams where the need to yell the neighbourhood awake produced only a strangled whimper. He pushed her towards the wall, whose whitewash hung off in brittle flakes, and crackled as her cheek made contact. Her heart thundered in her chest.

‘Have you been watching me, Doña Consuelo?’ he said, his face appearing over her shoulder, the sourness of his winy breath in her nostrils. ‘Have you been keeping a little eye out for me? Perhaps…since you lost your husband your bed’s been a bit cold at night.’

She gasped as he slipped his hand between her bare legs. It was rough. An automatic reflex clamped her thighs shut. He sawed his hand up to her crotch. A voice in her head remonstrated with her for being so stupid. Her heart walloped in her throat while her brain screamed for her to say something.

‘If it’s money you want…’ she said, in a voice that whispered to the flaking whitewash.

‘Well,’ he said, pulling his hand away, ‘how much have you got? I don’t come cheap, you know. Especially for the sort of thing you like.’

He took her handbag off her shoulder, flipped it open and found her wallet.

‘A hundred and twenty euros!’ he said, disgusted.

‘Take it,’ she said, her voice still stuck under her thyroid.

‘Thank you, thank you very much,’ he said, dropping her handbag to his feet. ‘But that’s not enough for what you want. Come back with the rest tomorrow.’

He pressed against her. She felt his obscene hardness against her buttocks. His face came over her shoulder once more and he kissed her on the corner of her mouth, his wine and tobacco breath and bitter little tongue slipping between her lips.

He pushed himself away, a gold ring on his finger flashed in the corner of her eye. He stepped back, kicked her handbag down the street.

‘Fuck off, whore,’ he said. ‘You make me sick.’

The steel tips receded. Consuelo’s throat still throbbed so that breathing was more like swallowing without being able to achieve either. She looked back to where he’d gone, confused at her escape. The empty cobbles shone under the yellow light. She pushed away from the wall, snatched up her handbag and ran, slipping and hobbling, down the street to the main road where she hailed a cab. She sat in the back with the city floating past her pallid face. Her hands shook too much to light the cigarette she’d managed to get into her mouth. The driver lit it for her.

At home she found money in her desk to pay for the taxi. She ran upstairs and checked the boys in their beds. She went to her own room and stripped off and looked at herself in the mirror. He hadn’t marked her. She showered endlessly, soaping and resoaping herself, rinsing herself again and again.

She went back to her desk in her dressing gown and sat in the dark, feeling nauseous, head aching, waiting for dawn. When it was the earliest possible acceptable moment, she phoned Alicia Aguado and asked for an emergency appointment.

3

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 02.00 hrs

Juez Esteban Calderón was not on business. The urbane and highly successful judge had told his wife, Inés, that he was working late before going to dinner with a group of young state judges who had come down from Madrid on a training course. He had worked late and he had gone to the dinner, but he’d excused himself early and was now taking his favourite little detour down the side of the San Marcos church to reach ‘the penthouse of promise’, which overlooked the church of Santa Isabel. He usually enjoyed smoking a cigarette at the edge of the small, floodlit plaza, looking from within the darkness at the fountain and the massive portal of the church. It calmed him after long days spent with prosecutors and policemen and kept him out of the way of some bars around the corner, which were frequented by colleagues. If they saw him there it would get back to Inés and there’d be awkward questions. He also needed a few moments to rein in his quivering sexual tension, which started every morning when he woke up and imagined the long coppery hair and mulatto skin of his Cuban girlfriend, Marisa Moreno, who lived in the penthouse just visible from where he was sitting.

His cigarette hissed in a puddle where he’d tossed it, half smoked. He took off his jacket. A breeze sprayed droplets of water from the orange trees on to his back, and he caught his breath at the lash of its sudden chill. He kept to the wall of the church until he was in the darkness of the narrow street. His finger hovered over the top button of the entry phone as an accumulation of half thoughts made him hesitate: subterfuge, infidelity, fear, sex, dizziness and death. He scratched at the air above the button; these unusual thoughts made him feel that he was on the brink of something like a great change. What to do? Either step over the edge or fall back. He swallowed some thick, bitter saliva from his fast smoking. The sensuality of the lash of raindrops across his back reached that nexus of nerves in the base of his spine. The unease disappeared. His recklessness made him feel alive again and his cock leapt in his pants. He hit the buzzer.

‘It’s me,’ he said, to the crackle of Marisa’s voice.

‘You sound thirsty.’

‘Not thirsty,’ he said, clearing his throat.

The two-man lift didn’t seem to have enough air and he started panting. Its stainless steel panels reflected the absurd shape of his arousal and he rearranged himself. He brushed back his thinning hair, loosened his flamboyant tie and knocked on her door. It opened a crack and Marisa’s amber eyes blinked slowly. The door fell open. She was wearing a long, orange silk shift, which nearly reached the floor. It was fastened with a single amber disc between her flat breasts. She kissed him and slipped a cube of ice from between her lips into his confused mouth and something like a firework went off in the back of his head.

She held him at bay with a single finger on his sternum. The ice cooled his tongue. She gave him an appraising look, from crown to crotch, and admonished him with a raised eyebrow. She took his jacket and hurled it into the room. He loved this whorish stuff she did, and she knew it. She dropped to her haunches, undid his belt and tugged his trousers and underpants down, then eased him profoundly into the coolness of her mouth. Calderón braced himself in the doorframe and gritted his teeth. She looked up at his agony with wide eyes. He lasted less than a minute.

She stood, turned on her heel and strode back into her apartment. Calderón pulled himself together. He didn’t hear her hawking and spitting in the bathroom. He just saw her reappear from the kitchen, carrying two chilled glasses of cava.

‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ she said, looking at the thin, gold wafer of watch on her wrist, ‘and then I remembered my mother telling me that the only time a Sevillano wasn’t late was for the bulls.’

Calderón was too dazed to comment. Marisa drank from her flute. Twenty gold and silver bracelets rattled on her forearm. She lit a cigarette, crossed her legs and let the shift slip away to reveal a long, slim leg, orange panties and a hard brown stomach. Calderón knew that stomach, its paper-thin skin, hard wriggling muscularity and soft coppery down. He’d laid his head on it and stroked the tight copper curls of her pubis.

‘Esteban!’

He snapped out of the natural revolutions of his mind.

‘Have you eaten?’ he asked, nothing else coming to him, conversation not being one of the strengths of their relationship.

‘I don’t need any feeding,’ she said, taking a shelled brazil nut from a bowl, and putting it between her hard, white teeth. ‘I’m quite ready to be fucked.’

The nut went off in her mouth like a silenced gun and Calderón reacted like a sprinter out of the blocks. He fell into her snake-like arms and bit into her unnaturally long neck, which seemed stretched, like those of African tribal women. In fact for him, that was her attraction: part sophisticate, part savage. She’d lived in Paris, modelling for Givenchy, and travelled across the Sahara with a caravan of Tuaregs. She’d slept with a famous movie director in Los Angeles and lived with a fisherman on the beach near Maputo in Mozambique. She’d worked for an artist in New York, and spent six months in the Congo learning how to carve wood. Calderón knew all this, and believed it because Marisa was such an extraordinary creature, but he didn’t have the first idea of what was going on in her head. So, like a good lawyer, he clung to these few dazzling facts.

After sex they went to bed, which for Marisa was a place to talk or sleep but not for the writhings and juices of sex. They lay naked under a sheet with light from the street in parallelograms on the wall and ceiling. The cava fizzed in glasses balanced on their chests. They shared an ashtray in the trough between their bodies.

‘Shouldn’t you have gone by now?’ said Marisa.

‘Just a little bit longer,’ said Calderón, drowsy.

‘What does Inés think you’re doing all this time?’ asked Marisa, for something to say.

‘I’m at a dinner…for work.’

‘You’re just about the last person in the world who should be married,’ she said.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well, maybe not. After all, you Sevillanos are very conservative. Is that why you married her?’

‘Part of it.’

‘What was the other part?’ she asked, pointing the cone of her cigarette at his chest. ‘The more interesting part.’

She burnt a hair off one of his nipples; the smell of it filled his nostrils.

‘Careful,’ he said, feeling the sting, ‘you don’t want ash all over the sheets.’

She rolled back from him, flicked her cigarette out on to the balcony.

‘I like to hear the parts that people don’t want to tell me about,’ she said.

Her coppery hair was splayed out on the white pillow. He hadn’t been able to look at her hair without thinking of the other woman he’d known with hair of the same colour. It had never occurred to him to tell anybody about the late Maddy Krugman except the police in his statement. He hadn’t even talked to Inés about that night. She knew the story from the newspapers, the surface of it anyway, and that was all she’d wanted to know.

Marisa raised her head and sipped from her flute. He was attracted to her for the same reason that he’d been attracted to Maddy: the beauty, the glamour, the sexiness and the complete mystery. But what was he to her? What had he been to Maddy Krugman? That was something that occupied his spare thinking time. Especially those hours of the early morning, when he woke up next to Inés and thought that he might be dead.

‘I don’t really give a fuck why you married her,’ said Marisa, trying a well-tested trick.

‘Well, that’s not what’s interesting.’

‘I’m not sure I need to know what is interesting,’ said Marisa. ‘Most men who think they’re fascinating only ever talk about themselves…their successes.’

‘This wasn’t one of my successes,’ said Calderón. ‘It was one of my greatest failures.’

He’d made a snap decision to tell her. Candour was not one of his strongest suits; in his society it had a way of coming back on you, but Marisa was an outsider. He also wanted to fascinate her. Having always been the object of fascination to women he’d understood completely, he had the uncomfortable feeling of being ordinary with exotic creatures like Maddy Krugman and Marisa Moreno. Here, he thought, was an opportunity to intrigue the intriguers.

‘It was about four years ago and I’d just announced my engagement to Inés,’ he said. ‘I was called to a situation, which looked like a murder-suicide. There were some anomalies, which meant that the detective, who, by a coincidence, happened to be the ex-husband of Inés, wanted to treat it as a double murder investigation. The victim’s neighbours were American. The woman was an artist and stunningly beautiful. She was a photographer with a taste for the weird. Her name was Maddy Krugman and I fell in love with her. We had a brief but intense affair until her insane husband found out and cornered us in an apartment one night. To cut a long and painful story short, he shot her and then himself. I was lucky not to get a bullet in the head as well.’

They lay in silence. Voices came up over the balcony rail from the street. A warm breeze blew at the voile curtains, which billowed into the room, bringing the smell of rain and the promise of hot weather in the morning.

‘And that’s why you married Inés.’

‘Maddy was dead. I was very badly shaken. Inés represented stability.’

‘Did you tell her you’d fallen in love with this woman?’

‘We never talked about it.’

‘And what now…four years later?’

‘I feel nothing for Inés,’ said Calderón, which was not quite the whole truth. He did feel something for her. He hated her. He could hardly bear to share her bed, had to steel himself to her touch, and he couldn’t understand why. He had no idea where it came from. She hadn’t changed. She had been both good to him and for him after the Maddy incident. This feeling of dying he had when he was with her in bed was a symptom. Of what, he could not say.

‘Well, Esteban, you’re a member of a very large club.’

‘Have you ever been married?’

‘You are joking,’ said Marisa. ‘I watched the soap opera of my parents’ marriage for fifteen years. That was enough to warn me off that particular bourgeois institution.’

‘And what are you doing with me?’ asked Calderón, fishing for something, but not sure what. ‘It doesn’t get more bourgeois than having an affair with a state judge.’

‘Being bourgeois is a state of mind,’ she said. ‘What you do means nothing to me. It has no bearing on us. We’re having an affair and it will carry on until it burns out. But I’m not going to get married and you already are.’

‘You said I was the last person in the world who should be married,’ said Calderón.

‘People get married if they want to have kids and fit into society, or, if they’re suckers, they marry their dream.’

‘I didn’t marry my dream,’ said Calderón. ‘I married everybody else’s dream. I was the brilliant young judge, Inés was the brilliant and beautiful young prosecutor. We were the “golden couple”, as seen on TV.’

‘You don’t have any children,’ said Marisa. ‘Get divorced.’

‘It’s not so easy.’

‘Why not? It’s taken you four years to find out that you’re incompatible,’ said Marisa. ‘Get out now while you’re still young.’

‘You’ve had a lot of lovers.’

‘I might have been to bed with a lot of men but I’ve only had four lovers.’

‘And how do you define a lover?’ asked Calderón, still fishing.

‘Someone I love and who loves me.’

‘Sounds simple.’

‘It can be…as long as you don’t let life fuck it up.’

The question burned inside Calderón. Did she love him? But almost as soon as it came into his mind he had to ask himself whether he loved her. They cancelled each other out. He’d been fucking her for nine months. That wasn’t quite fair, or was it? Marisa could hear his brain working. She recognized the sound. Men always assumed their brains were silent rather than grinding away like sabotaged machinery.

‘So now you’re going to tell me,’ said Marisa, ‘that you can’t get a divorce for all those bourgeois reasons—career, status, social acceptance, property and money.’

That was it, thought Calderón, his face going slack in the dark. That was precisely why he couldn’t get a divorce. He would lose everything. He had only just scraped his career back together again after the Maddy debacle. Being related to the Magistrado Juez Decano de Sevilla had helped, but so had his marriage to Inés. If he divorced her now his career might easily drift, his friends would slip away, he would lose his apartment and he would be poorer. Inés would make sure of all that.

‘There is, of course, a bourgeois solution to that,’ said Marisa.

‘What?’ said Calderón, turning to look at her between her upturned nipples, suddenly hopeful.

‘You could murder her,’ she said, throwing open her hands, easy peasy.

Calderón smiled at first, not quite registering what she had said. His smile turned into a grin and then he laughed. As he laughed his head bounced on Marisa’s taut stomach and it bounced higher and higher as her muscles tightened with laughter. He sat up spluttering at the brilliant absurdity of her idea.

‘Me, the leading Juez de Instrucción in Seville, killing his wife?’

‘Ask her ex-husband for some advice,’ said Marisa, her stomach still contracting with laughter. ‘He should know how to commit the perfect murder.’

4

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 05.30 hrs

Manuela Falcón was in bed, but not sleeping. It was 5.30 in the morning. She had the bedside light on, knees up, flicking through Vogue but not reading, not even looking at the pictures. She had too much on her mind: her property portfolio, the money she owed to the banks, the mortgage repayments, the lack of rental income, the lawyer’s fees, the two deeds due to be signed this morning, which would release her capital into beautifully fluid funds of cash.

‘For God’s sake, relax,’ said Angel, waking up in bed next to her, still groggy with sleep and nursing a small cognac-induced hangover. ‘What are you so anxious about?’

‘I can’t believe you’ve asked that question,’ said Manuela. ‘The deeds, this morning?’

Angel Zarrías blinked into his pillow. He’d forgotten.

‘Look, my darling,’ he said, rolling over, ‘you know that nothing happens, even if you think about it all the time. It only happens…’

‘Yes, I know, Angel, it only happens when it happens. But even you can understand that there’s uncertainty before it happens.’

‘But if you don’t sleep and you churn it over in your head in an endless washing cycle it has no effect on the outcome, so you might as well forget about it. Handle the horror if it happens, but don’t torture yourself with the theory of it.’

Manuela flicked through the pages of Vogue even more viciously, but she felt better. Angel could do that to her. He was older. He had authority. He had experience.

‘It’s all right for you,’ she said, gently, ‘you don’t owe six hundred thousand euros to the bank.’

‘But I also don’t own nearly two million euros’ worth of property.’

‘I own one million eight hundred thousand euros’ worth of property. I owe six hundred thousand to the bank. The lawyer’s fees are…Forget it. Let’s not talk about numbers. They make me sick. Nothing has any value until it’s sold.’

‘Which is what you’re about to do,’ said Angel, in his most solid, reinforced concrete voice.

‘Anything can happen,’ she said, turning a page so viciously she tore it.

‘But it tends not to.’

‘The market’s nervous.’

‘Which is why you’re selling. Nobody’s going to withdraw in the next eight hours,’ he said, struggling to sit up in bed. ‘Most people would kill to be in your position.’

‘With two empty properties, no rent and four thousand a month going out?’

‘Well, clearly I’m looking at it from a more advantageous perspective.’

Manuela liked this. However hard she tried, she couldn’t get Angel to participate in her catalogue of imagined horrors. His objective authority made her feel quite girlish. She hadn’t yet got to the point of recognizing what their relationship had become, how it fitted with her powerful needs. All she knew was that Angel was a colossal comfort to her.

‘Relax,’ said Angel, pulling her to him, kissing the top of her head.

‘Wouldn’t it be great to be able to compress time and just be in tomorrow evening now,’ she said, snuggling up to him, ‘with money in the bank and the summer free?’

‘Let’s have a celebratory dinner at Salvador Rojo tonight.’

‘I was thinking that myself,’ she said, ‘but I was too superstitious to book it. We could ask Javier. He could bring Laura so you can have someone to flirt with.’

‘How very considerate of you,’ he said, kissing her head again.

When Angel and Manuela had met it seemed that the only thing holding her life together was her legal battle over Javier’s right to have inherited the house in which he was living. They’d met in her lawyer’s office, where Angel was sorting out his late wife’s estate. As soon as they’d shaken hands she’d felt something cave in high up around her stomach and no man had ever done that to her before. They left the lawyer’s office and went for a drink and, having never looked at older men, having always gone for ‘boys’, she immediately saw the point. Older men looked after you. You didn’t have to look after them.

The more she found out about Angel the more she fell for him. He was a phenomenally charming man, a committed politician (sometimes a little too committed), right wing, conservative, a Catholic, a lover of the bulls, and from an established family. In politics he’d been able to broker agreements between fanatically opposed factions just because neither party wanted to be disliked by him. He’d been ‘someone’ in the Partido Popular in Andalucía but had quit in a fury over the impossibility of getting anything to change. Recently he’d joined forces, in a public relations capacity, with a smaller right-wing party called Fuerza Andalucía, which was run by his old friend, Eduardo Rivero. He contributed a political column for the ABC newspaper and was also their highly respected bullfight commentator. With all these talents at his disposal it hadn’t taken him long to bring Javier and Manuela back together again.

‘All energy expended on court cases like yours is negative energy,’ Angel had told her. ‘That negative energy dominates your life, so that the rest of it has to go on hold. The only way to restart your life is to bring positive energy back into it.’

‘And how do I do that?’ she’d asked, looking at this huge source of positive energy in front of her with her big brown eyes.

‘Court cases use up resources, not just financial ones, but physical and emotional ones, too. So you have to be productive,’ he said. ‘What do you want from your life at the moment?’

‘That house!’ she’d said, despite being pretty keen on Angel right then, too.

‘It’s yours, Javier has offered it to you.’

‘There’s the small matter of one million euros…’

‘But he hasn’t said you can’t have it,’ said Angel. ‘And it’s much more productive to make money in order to buy something you really want, than to throw it away on useless lawyers.’

‘He’s not useless,’ she said, and ran out of steam.

There were a few thousand other reasons she had stacked up against Angel’s stunningly simple logic, but the source of most of them was her miserable emotional state, which was not something she wanted to peel back for him to see. So, she agreed with him, sold her veterinary practice at the beginning of 2003, borrowed money against the property she had inherited in El Puerto de Santa Maria and invested it in Seville’s booming property market. After three years of buying, renovating and selling she had forgotten about Javier’s house, the court case and that hollow feeling at the top of her stomach. She now lived with Angel in a penthouse apartment overlooking the majestic, treelined Plaza Cristo de Burgos in the middle of the old city and her life was full and about to be even sweeter.

‘How did it go last night?’ asked Manuela. ‘I can tell you wound up on the brandy.’

‘Gah!’ said Angel, wincing at some gripe in his intestines.

‘No smoking for you until after coffee this morning.’

‘Maybe my breath could become a cheap form of renewable energy,’ said Angel, fingering some sleep out of his eye. ‘In fact everyone’s breath could, because all we do is spout hot, alcoholic air.’

‘Is the master of positive energy getting a little bit bored with his cronies?’

‘Not bored. They’re my friends,’ said Angel, shrugging. ‘It’s one of the advantages of age that we can tell each other the same stories over and over and still laugh.’

‘Age is a state of mind, and you’re still young,’ said Manuela. ‘Maybe you should go back to the commercial side of your public relations business. Forget politics and all those self-important fools.’

‘And finally she reveals what she thinks of my closest friends.’

‘I like your friends, it’s just…the politics,’ said Manuela. ‘Endless talk but nothing ever happens.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Angel, nodding. ‘The last time there was an event in this country was the horror of 11th March 2004, and look what happened: the whole country pulled together and by due process of democracy kicked out a perfectly good government. Then we bowed down to the terrorists and pulled out of Iraq. And after that? We sank back into the comfort of our lives.’

‘And drank too much brandy.’

‘Exactly,’ said Angel, looking at her with his hair exploded in all directions. ‘You know what someone was saying last night?’

‘Was this the interesting bit?’ she said, teasing him on.

‘We need a return to benevolent dictatorship,’ said Angel, throwing up his hands in mock exasperation.

‘You might find yourselves out on a limb there,’ said Manuela. ‘People don’t like turmoil with troops and tanks on the streets. They want a cold beer, a tapa and something stupid to watch on TV.’

‘My point entirely,’ said Angel, slapping his stomach. ‘Nobody listened. We’ve got a population dying of decadence, so morally moribund that they no longer know what they want, apart from knee-jerk consumption, and my “cronies” think that they’ll be loved if they do these people the favour of mounting a coup.’

‘I don’t want to see you on television, standing on a desk in Parliament with a gun in your hand.’

‘I’ll have to lose some weight first,’ said Angel.

Calderón came to with a jolt and a sense of real panic left over from a dream he could not recollect. He was surprised to see Marisa’s long brown back in the bed beside him, instead of Inés’s white nightdress. He’d overslept. It was now 6 a.m. and he would have to go back to his apartment and deal with some very awkward questions from Inés.

His frantic leap from the bed woke Marisa. He dressed, shaking his head at the slug trails of dried semen on his thigh.

‘Take a shower,’ said Marisa.

‘No time.’

‘Anyway, she’s not an idiot—so you tell me.’

‘No, she’s not,’ said Calderón, looking for his other shoe, ‘but as long as certain rules are obeyed then the whole thing can be glossed over.’

‘This must be the bourgeois protocol for affairs outside marriage.’

‘That’s right,’ said Calderón, irritated by her. ‘You can’t stay out all night because that is making a complete joke out of the institution.’

‘What’s the cut-off point between a “serious” marriage and a “joke” one?’ asked Marisa. ‘Three o’clock…three thirty? No. That’s OK. I think by four o’clock it’s ridiculous. By four thirty it is a complete joke. By six, six thirty…it’s a farce.’

‘By six it’s a tragedy,’ said Calderón, searching the floor madly. ‘Where is my fucking shoe?’

‘Under the chair,’ said Marisa. ‘And don’t forget your camera on the coffee table. I’ve left a present or two on it for you.’

He threw on his jacket, pocketed the camera, dug his foot into his shoe.

‘How did you find my camera?’ he asked, kneeling down by the bed.

‘I went through your jacket while you were asleep,’ she said. ‘I come from a bourgeois family; I kick against it, but I know all the tricks. Don’t worry, I didn’t erase all those stupid shots of your lawyers’ dinner to prove to your very intelligent wife that you weren’t out all night fucking your girlfriend.’

‘Well, thanks very much for that.’

‘And I haven’t been naughty.’

‘No?’

‘I told you I left some presents on the camera for you. Just don’t let her see.’

He nodded, suddenly in a hurry again. They kissed. Going down in the lift he tidied himself up, got everything tucked away and rubbed his face into life to prepare for the lie which he practised. Even he saw the two micro movements of his eyebrows, which Javier Falcón had told him was the first and surest sign of a liar. If he knew that, then Inés would know it, too.

No taxis out at this early hour of the morning. He should have called for one. He set off at a fast walk. Memories ricocheted around his mind, which seemed to dip in and out of his consciousness. The lie. The truth. The reality. The dream. And it came back to him with the same sense of panic he’d had on waking in Marisa’s apartment: his hands closing around Inés’s slim throat. He was throttling her, but she wasn’t turning puce or purple and her tongue wasn’t thickening with blood and protruding. She was looking up at him with her eyes full of love. And, yes, she was stroking his forearms, encouraging him to do it. The bourgeois solution to awkward divorces—murder. Absurd. He knew from his work with the homicide squad that the first person to be grilled in a murder case was the spouse.

The streets were still wet from last night’s rain, the cobbles greasy. He was sweating and the smell of Marisa came up off his shirt. It occurred to him that he’d never felt guilty. He didn’t know what it was other than a legal state. Since he’d been married to Inés he’d had affairs with four women of whom Marisa had lasted the longest. He’d also had one-night stands or afternoons with two other women. And there was the prostitute in Barcelona, but he didn’t like to think of that. He’d even had sex with one of these women whilst having an affair with another as a married man, which must make him a serial philanderer. Except it didn’t feel like philandering. There was supposed to be something enjoyable about philandering. It was romantic, wasn’t it…in the eighteenth-century sense of the word? But what he’d been doing was not enjoyable. He was trying to fill a hole, which, with every affair, grew bigger. So what was this expanding void? Now that would be a thing to answer, if he could ever find the time to think about it.

He slipped on a cobble, half fell, scuffed his hand on the pavement. It pulled him out of his head and on to more practical business. He’d have to have a shower as soon as he got in. Marisa was in his sinuses. Maybe he should have had a shower before he left, but then there would have been the smell of Marisa’s soap. Then another revelation. What did he care? Why the grand pretence? Inés knew. They’d had fights—never about his affairs, but about ridiculous stuff, which was a cover for the unmentionable. She could have got out. She could have left him years ago, but she’d stayed. That was significant.

The graze on his hand was stinging. His thoughts made him feel stronger. He wasn’t afraid of Inés. She could strike fear into others. He’d seen her in court. But not him. He had the upper hand. He fucked around and she stayed.

His apartment block on Calle San Vicente appeared before him. He opened the door with a flourish. He didn’t know whether it was the conclusion he’d arrived at, his stinging hand or the fact that he tripped up on the stairs because the decorators, those idle sods, had pushed their dustsheets to one side rather than clearing them away—but he began to feel just a little bit cruel.

The first-floor apartment was silent. It was 6.30 a.m. He went to his study and emptied the pockets of his suit on to his desk in the dark. He took off his jacket and trousers and left them on a chair and went to the bathroom. Inés was asleep. He stripped off his pants and socks, threw them in the laundry basket and showered.

Inés was not asleep. She lay with her shiny, dark eyes blinking in the sepia light as morning crept through the louvred shutters. She had been awake since 4.30 a.m. when she’d found her husband’s side of the bed vacant. She’d sat up in bed, arms folded across her flat chest, her brain seething. She’d run the marathon of her thoughts for two hours, her insides molten with rage at the humiliation of finding his undented pillow. But then she would suddenly feel weak at the thought of facing this latest demonstration of his infidelity, because that’s what it was—a demonstration.

In those hours she realized that the only area of her life that was functioning was her work, which now bored her. Not that the work had changed in any way, but her perspective had. She wanted to be a wife and mother. She wanted to live in a big old house with a patio, inside the city walls. She wanted to go for walks in the park, meet her friends for lunch, take her children to see her parents.

None of that had happened. After the American bitch had been removed from the scene, she and Esteban had come together, had, in her mind, grown closer. She had stopped using contraceptives without telling him, wanting to surprise him, but her periods kept coming with plodding regularity. She’d gone for a check-up and been pronounced a perfectly healthy female of the species. After sex one morning she’d saved a sample of his sperm and taken it for a fertility test. The result was that he was a man of exceptional virility. Had he known, he would have framed the result and hung it next to their wedding photograph.

The sale of her apartment had gone through quickly. She’d banked the money and started looking for her dream home. But Esteban loathed the houses that she wanted to buy and refused to look at them. The property market boomed. The money she’d got for her apartment now looked paltry. Her dream became an impossibility. They lived in his very masculine, aggressively modern apartment on the Calle San Vicente and he became angry if she tried to change a single detail. He wouldn’t even let her put a chain on the door, but that was because he didn’t want to have to be let in by her reeking of sex after a night out.

Their sex life began to falter. She knew he was having affairs from the tireless grind of his lovemaking and the paucity of his ejaculations. She tried to be more daring. He made her feel foolish, as if her proposed ‘games’ were ridiculous. Then suddenly he’d taken up her offer to ‘play games’ but given her debasing roles, seemingly inspired by internet porn. She subjected herself to his ministrations, hiding her pain and shame in the pillow.

At least she wasn’t fat. She inspected herself minutely in the mirror every day. It satisfied her to see the deflation of her bust, her individual ribs and her concave thighs. Sometimes she would feel dizzy in court. Her friends told her she’d never get pregnant. She smiled at them, her pale skin stretched tight over her beautiful face, her aura frighteningly beatific.

Inés was toying with the idea of a massive confrontation when she heard Esteban put his key in the lock. Her stick-thin forearms seemed to have grown more hair and they made her feel curiously weak. She sank down into the bed and pretended to be asleep.

She heard him empty his pockets and go to the bathroom. The shower came on. She ran barefoot to his study, saw his suit and sniffed it over like a dog: cigarettes, perfume, old sex. Her eyes were riveted to the digital camera. She touched it with her knuckle. Still warm. She burned to know what was on its memory. The shower door rolled open. She ran back to bed and lay with her heart beating fast as a cat’s.

His weight tipped her feather-light frame in the bed. She waited for his breathing to settle into the pattern that she knew was his sleep. Her heart slowed. Her mind cooled. She slid out of the bed. He didn’t move. In the study she pressed the camera’s quick-view button and caught her breath as a miniature Marisa appeared on the screen. She was naked on the sofa, legs apart, hands covering her pubis. Inés pressed again. Marisa naked, kneeling and looking backwards over her shoulder. The whore. She pressed again and again and only found her husband’s alibi of the judges’ dinner. She went back to the whore. Who was she? The black bitch. She had to know.

Inés’s laptop was in the hall. She took it into the kitchen and booted it up. In the grey-bar time she went back to his study and scoured the shelves for the download lead. Back to the kitchen. Opened up the camera, plugged in the lead, connected it to her laptop. Total concentration.

The icon appeared on the screen. The software automatically loaded. She clicked on ‘import’ and clenched her fist as she saw she was going to have to download fifty-four shots to get the ones she wanted. She stared at the screen, willing it to process faster. She heard only the breathing of the computer’s fan and the flickering of the hard disk. She didn’t hear the bedclothes stir. She didn’t hear his bare foot on the wooden floor. She didn’t even hear his question properly.

His voice did turn her round. She was conscious of her cotton nightdress on the points of her shoulders, its hem brushing the tops of her thighs, as she took in the full-frontal nudity of her husband standing in the frame of the kitchen door.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘What?’ said Inés, her eyes unable to look anywhere other than his treacherous genitals.

He repeated his question.

The adrenaline spike was so powerful she wasn’t sure that her heart could cope with the sudden surge.

After nearly twenty years’ experience in the criminal element Calderón could recognize terror when he saw it. The wide eyes, the mouth neither open nor closed, the paralysed facial muscles.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked, for a third time but with no sleep in his voice, pure weight.

‘Nothing,’ she said, keeping her back to the laptop, but unable to stop the reflex action of her arms fanning out to prevent him from seeing her laptop.

Calderón swept her aside, not roughly, but she was so light she had to stop her fragile ribs from cracking against the edge of the black granite work surface. He saw his camera, the lead, the thumbnails of the lawyers’ dinner appearing in the photo library. And then plink, plink. Two shots of Marisa: My present to you. It was embarrassing, incriminating and worse: it was the little boy being found out.

‘Who is she?’ asked Inés, her finger ends white against the black granite.

His look was murderous and in no way offset by the ridiculousness of his nudity.

‘Who is she, that you can stay out all night, leaving your wife alone in the marital bed?’

The words incensed him, which was Inés’s calculation. Her fear had vanished. She wanted something from him—his concentrated attention.

‘Who is she, that you can whore with her until six in the morning, in defiance of your marital vows?’

Another calculated sentence, using some of the oratory she employed in court.

He turned on her, with the slow intent of an animal who’s found a rival on his territory. The thickness around his belly, the shrivelled penis, the slim thighs should have made him laughable, but his head was dipped down and his eyes looked up from under his brow. His rage was palpable. Still Inés couldn’t help herself. The taunts leapt from her lips.

‘Do you fuck her like you fuck me? Do you make her shout with pain?’

Inés did not finish because she was unaccountably on the floor, with her feet pedalling against the white marble tiles, trying to fight air back into her lungs. She focused on his toes, the knuckles crimped as they gripped. He kicked her. His big toe invaded her kidney. She bit on air. She was shocked. It was the first time he’d ever hit her. She’d provoked him. She’d wanted a reaction. But she had been shocked by his restraint. She’d thought he would lash out, backhand her across the face to shut that taunting uxorial mouth, fatten her lip, bruise her cheek. She wanted to wear the badge of his violence to show the world what he was really like and draw some daily remorse from him until the damage faded. But he’d hit her under the arch of her ribs, kicked her in the side.

Her chest creaked as she found the motor memory to breathe again. She felt her husband’s hand at the back of her head, stroking. You see, he did love her. Now for the remorse and the tenderness. This was just another fling…But he wasn’t stroking her, he was reaching into her hair, he was sheafing it. His nails dug into her scalp. He shook her head as if she were a dog, caught by the scruff, and stood up from his crouch. She hadn’t found her feet and she hung from his hand. He dragged her from the kitchen, hauled her down the corridor and flung her at the bed. She bounced and rolled off to the side. Three strides and he was on her again. She scrambled under the bed.

It hadn’t worked out as she’d thought. His hand reached for her under the bed, grabbing at her nightdress. She flinched away from it. His face appeared, hideous with rage. He stood up. His feet moved off. She watched them, as if they were loaded weapons. They left the room. He swore and slammed the door. Her scalp burned. Her fear was overriding all other emotions. She couldn’t scream, she couldn’t cry.

Under the bed was good. There were childhood memories of safety, of observing in secrecy, but they couldn’t contain her confusion. Her brain lunged at what she wanted to be certainties, but they wouldn’t support her. Instead she found herself trying to accommodate his behaviour. She had proved his infidelity to him. She had humiliated him. He was angry because he felt guilty. That was natural. You lashed out at the one you loved. That was it, wasn’t it? He didn’t want to be whoring with that black bitch. He just couldn’t help himself. He was an alpha male, a virile, high-octane performer. She shouldn’t be so hard on him. She held on to her side and squeezed her eyes shut at a jab of pain in her kidney.

The door swung open, the feet came back into the room. His presence made her shrink. He took fresh socks and pants from the drawer and put them on. He stepped into a pair of trousers and took a crisp, white shirt, ironed by the laundry where he still sent his clothes. He shook it out and drove his arms into the sleeves, shot the cuffs. He whipped a crimson tie into a perfect knot. He was efficient, vigorous and precise. He rammed those brutal feet into a pair of shoes, threw on a jacket—his savagery now perfectly disguised.

‘I’m working late tonight,’ he said, his tone back to normal.

The apartment door clicked shut. Inés crawled out from under the bed and flopped against the wall. She sat with her legs splayed out, her hands helpless by her sides. The first sob jolted her away from the wall.

5

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 06.30 hrs

Falcón came to in the profound darkness of his shuttered bedroom. He lay there in his private universe, contemplating last night’s events. After the disappointment at Consuelo’s restaurant the drink with Laura had gone better than expected. They’d agreed to see each other as friends. She was only a little offended that he was ending their affair with, as he’d told her, no other prospect in sight.

He showered and put on a dark suit and white shirt and folded a tie into his pocket. He had meetings planned all morning after he’d been to see the Médico Forense. It was a morning of shimmering brilliance, with not a cloud in the sky. The rain had cleansed the atmosphere of all that puzzling electricity.

A temperature gauge outside in the street told him it was 16°C while the radio warned that a great heat was about to descend on Seville and by evening they should expect temperatures in excess of 36°C.

The Forensic Institute was next to the Hospital de la Macarena behind the Andalucían Parliament, which itself looked across the road to the Basilica de la Macarena, just inside the old city walls. At 8.15 a.m. Falcón was early, but the Médico Forense had already arrived.

Dr Pintado had the file open on his desk and was reminding himself of the detail of the autopsy. They shook hands, sat down and he resumed his reading.

‘What I concentrated on in this case,’ he said, still scanning the pages, ‘apart from the cause of death, which was straightforward—he was poisoned with potassium cyanide—was giving you as much help as possible on the identification of the body.’

‘Potassium cyanide?’ said Falcón. ‘That’s not exactly in keeping with the ruthlessness of the post-mortem operations. Was it injected?’

‘No, ingested,’ said Pintado, other things on his mind. ‘The face…I might be able to help you with that, or rather I have a friend who is interested in helping. You remember I was telling you about a case I handled in Bilbao, where they made a facial model from a skull found in a shallow grave?’

‘It cost a fortune.’

‘That’s right, and you don’t get resources like that for any old murder.’

‘So how much does your friend cost?’

‘He’s free.’

‘And who is he?’

‘He’s a sort of sculptor, but he’s not that interested in the body, just faces.’

‘Would I have heard of him?’

‘No. He’s strictly amateur. His name is Miguel Covo. He’s seventy-four years old and retired,’ said Pintado. ‘But he’s been working with faces for nearly sixty years. He builds them out of clay, makes moulds for wax, and carves them out of stone, although that’s quite a recent development.’

‘What’s he proposing and why is it free?’

‘Well, he’s never done this kind of thing before, but he wants to try,’ said Pintado. ‘I let him take a plaster cast of the head last night.’

‘OK, so there’s no decision,’ said Falcón.

‘He’ll make up a half-dozen models, do some sketches and then start working up the face. He’ll paint it, too, and give it hair—real hair. His studio can give you the creeps, especially if he likes you and introduces you to his mother.’

‘I’ve always got on well with mothers.’

‘He keeps her in a cupboard,’ said Dr Pintado. ‘Just a model of her, I mean.’

‘It would be cruel to keep a woman in her nineties in a cupboard.’

‘She died when he was small, which was when his fascination with faces started. He wanted the photographs of her to be more real. So he recreated her. It was the only time he fashioned a body. She’s in that cupboard with real hair, make-up, her own clothes and shoes.’

‘So, he’s weird, too?’

‘Of course he is,’ said Pintado, ‘but likeably weird. You might not want to invite him to dinner with the Comisario and his wife, though.’

‘Why not?’ said Falcón. ‘It would make a change from the opera.’

‘Anyway, he’ll call you when he has something, but…not tomorrow.’

‘What else have you got?’

‘It’s all helpful, but not as helpful as a physical image,’ said Pintado. ‘I worked with a guy who did forensics on mass graves in Bosnia and I learnt a bit from him. The first thing is dental. I’ve made a full set of digital X-rays and notes about each tooth. He’s had extensive orthodontic work done to get the teeth all straight and looking perfect.’

‘How old is this guy?’

‘Mid forties.’

‘And normally you’d have that sort of work done in your early teens.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And there wasn’t a lot of orthodontic work being done in Spain in the mid seventies.’

‘Most likely it was done in America,’ said Pintado. ‘Apart from that, there’s nothing much else to go on, dentally. He’s had no major work done, and only a molar missing on the lower right side.’

‘Have you found any distinguishing marks on the outside of the body—moles, birthmarks?’

‘No, but I did come across something interesting on his hands.’

‘Forgive me, Doctor, but…’

‘I know. They were severed. But I checked the lymph nodes to see what was deposited there,’ said Pintado. ‘I’m sure our friend had a small tattoo on each hand.’

‘I don’t suppose there’s a snapshot of it in the lymph node?’ asked Falcón.

‘Lymph nodes are quite clever about killing bacteria and neutralizing toxins, but their talent for recreating images from tattoo ink, introduced into the bloodstream via the hand, is extremely limited. There was a trace of ink and that was all.’

‘What about surgery?’

‘There‘s good news and bad there,’ said Pintado. ‘He’s had surgery, but it was a hernia operation, which is just about the world’s most common procedure. His was also the most common type of inguinal hernia, so he has a scar on the right side of his pubis. I’d guess it was about three years old, but I’ll get one of the vascular surgeons to come over and confirm that for me. Then we’ll take a look at the mesh they used to patch the hernia and hopefully he’ll be able to tell me who supplied it, then you can find the hospitals they supply…and, I know, it’s going to take a lot of work and time.’

‘Maybe he had that done in America as well,’ said Falcón.

‘Like I said: good news and bad.’

‘What about his hair?’ asked Falcón. ‘They scalped him.’

‘He had hair that was at least long enough to cover his collar.’

‘How do you get that?’

‘He’s been on the beach this year,’ said Pintado, turning some photographs around for Falcón to look at. ‘You can see the tan lines on his arms and legs, but if you turn him over you don’t see any tan line at the back of his neck. In fact, if you look, it’s quite white compared to the rest of his back, which to me means that it rarely sees the sun.’

‘Would you describe him as “white”?’ asked Falcón. ‘His skin colour didn’t look Northern European to me.’

‘No. He’s olive-skinned.’

‘Do you think he was Spanish?’

‘Without doing any genetic testing, I would say that he was Mediterranean.’

‘Any scars?’

‘Nothing significant,’ said Pintado. ‘He’d sustained a fracture to his skull, but it’s years old.’

‘Anything interesting about the structure of his body that would give us an idea of what he did?’

‘Well, he wasn’t a bodybuilder,’ said Pintado. ‘Spine, shoulder and elbows indicate a deskbound, sedentary life. I’d say that his feet didn’t spend much time in shoes. The heels are more splayed than usual, with a lot of hardened skin.’

‘As you said, he liked the sun,’ said Falcón.

‘He also smoked cannabis and I would say he was a regular user, which could be thought of as unusual in someone in his mid forties,’ said Pintado. ‘Kids smoke dope, but if you’re still doing it in your forties it’s because it’s your milieu…you’re an artist, or a musician, or hanging out with that sort of crowd.’

‘So he’s a desk worker with long hair, who spent time in the sun, not wearing shoes, and smoking dope.’

‘A hard-working hippy.’

‘They might have been like that in the seventies, but it’s not the profile of a modern-day drug smuggler,’ said Falcón. ‘And potassium cyanide would be an unusual method of execution for people with 9mm handguns in their waistbands.’

The two men sat back from the desk. Falcón flicked through the photographs from the file hoping that something else might jump out at him. He was already thinking about the university and the Bellas Artes, but he didn’t want to confine himself at this early stage.

In this momentary silence the two men looked up at each other, as if they were on the brink of the same idea. From beyond the grey walls of the Facultad de Medicina came the unmistakable boom of a significant explosion, not far away.

Gloria Alanis was ready for work. By this time she would normally be on her way to her first client meeting, thinking how much, as it receded in the rearview mirror, she hated the drab seventies apartment block where she lived in the barrio of El Cerezo. She was a sales rep for a stationery company but her area of operation was Huelva. On the first Tuesday of every month there was a meeting of the sales team at the head office in Seville, followed by a team-building exercise, a lunch and then a mini-conference to show and discuss new products and promotions.

It meant that for one day during the month, she could put breakfast on the table for her husband and two children. She could also take her eight-year-old daughter, Lourdes, to school, while her husband delivered their three-year-old son, Pedro, to the pre-school which was visible from the back window of their fifth-floor apartment.

On this morning, instead of hating her apartment, she was looking down on the heads of her children and husband and feeling an unusual sensation of warmth and affection early in the week. Her husband sensed this, grabbed her and pulled her on to his lap.

‘Fernando,’ she said, warning him, in case he tried anything too salacious in front of the children.

‘I was thinking,’ he whispered in her ear, his lips tickling her lobe.

‘It’s always dangerous when you start doing that,’ she said, smiling at the children, who were now interested.

,‘I was thinking there should be more of us,’ he whispered. ‘Gloria, Fernando, Lourdes, Pedro and…’

‘You’re crazy,’ she said, loving those lips on her ear, saying these things.

‘We always talked about having four, didn’t we?’

‘But that was before we knew how much two cost,’ she said. ‘Now we work all day and still don’t have enough money to get out of this apartment or take a holiday.’

‘I have a secret,’ he said.

She knew he didn’t.

‘If it’s a lottery ticket, I don’t want to see it.’

‘It’s not a lottery ticket.’

She knew what it was: wild hope.

‘My God,’ he said, suddenly looking at his watch. ‘Hey, Pedro, we’ve got to get going, man.’

‘Tell us the secret,’ said the children.

He lifted Gloria up and put her on her feet.

‘If I tell you that, it’s not a secret any more,’ he said. ‘You have to wait for the secret to be revealed.’

‘Tell us now!’

‘This evening,’ he said, kissing Lourdes on the head and taking Pedro’s tiny hand.

Gloria went to the door with them. She kissed Pedro, who was staring at his feet, and not much interested. She kissed her husband on the mouth and whispered on his lips:

‘I hate you.’

‘By this evening you’ll love me again.’

She went back to the breakfast table and sat opposite Lourdes. There were another fifteen minutes before they had to leave. They spent a few minutes looking at one of Lourdes’ drawings before going to the window. Fernando and Pedro appeared below in the car park in front of the pre-school. They waved. Fernando held Pedro above his head and he waved back.

Having delivered the boy to school, Fernando walked off between the apartment blocks to the main road to catch the bus to work. Gloria turned back into the room. Lourdes was already at the table working on another drawing. Gloria sipped her coffee and played with her daughter’s silky hair. Fernando and his secrets. He played these games to keep them amused and their hopes up that they would eventually be able to buy their own apartment, but the property prices had exploded and they now knew that they would be renting for the rest of their lives. Gloria was never going to be anything other than a rep and, though Fernando kept saying he was going to take a plumbing course, he still needed to make the money he did as a labourer on the construction site. They’d been lucky to find this apartment with such a cheap rent. They were lucky to have two healthy children. As Fernando said: ‘We might not be rich, but we are lucky and luck will serve us better than all the money in the world.’

She didn’t immediately associate the shuddering tremor beneath her feet with the booming crash that came from the outside world. It was a noise so loud that her rib cage seemed to clutch at her spine and drive the air out of her lungs. The coffee cup jumped out of her hand and broke on the floor.

‘MAMÁ!’ screamed Lourdes, but there was nothing for Gloria to hear, she saw only her daughter’s wide-eyed horror and grabbed her.

Terrible things happened simultaneously. Windows shattered. Cracks and giant fissures opened up in the walls. Daylight appeared where it shouldn’t. Level horizons tilted. Doorframes folded. Solid concrete flexed. The ceiling crowded the floor. Walls broke in half. Water spurted from nowhere. Electricity crackled and sparked under broken tiles. A wardrobe shot out of sight. Gravity showed them its remorselessness. Mother and daughter were falling. Their small, fragile bodies were hurtling downwards in a miasma of bricks, steel, concrete, wire, tubing, furniture and dust. There was no time for words. There was no sound, because the sound was already so loud it rendered everything else silent. There wasn’t even any fear, because it had all become grossly incomprehensible. There was just the sickening plummet, the stunning impact and then a vast blackness, as of a great receding universe.

‘What the fuck was that?’ said Pintado.

Falcón knew exactly what it was. He’d heard an ETA car bomb explode when he was working in Barcelona. This sounded big. He kicked back his chair and ran out of the Institute without replying to Pintado’s question. He punched the Jefatura’s number into his mobile as he left. His first thought was that it was something in the Santa Justa station, the high-speed AVE arriving from Madrid. The railway station was less than a kilometre away to the southeast of the hospital.

‘Diga,’ said Ramírez.

‘There’s been a bomb, José Luis…’

‘I heard it even out here,’ said Ramírez.

‘I’m at the Institute. It sounded close. Get me some news.’

‘Hold it.’

Falcón ran past the receptionist, the mobile pressed to his ear, listening to Ramírez’s feet pounding down the corridor and up the stairs and people shouting in the Jefatura. The traffic had stopped everywhere. Drivers and passengers were getting out of their cars, looking to the northeast at a plume of black smoke.

‘The reports we’re getting,’ said Ramírez, panting, ‘is that there’s been an explosion in an apartment block on the corner of Calle Blanca Paloma and Calle Los Romeros in the barrio of El Cerezo.’

‘Where’s that? I don’t know it. It must be close because I can see the smoke.’

Ramírez found a wall map and gave rapid instructions.

‘Is there any report of a gas leak?’ asked Falcón, knowing this was wildly optimistic, like the so-called power surge on the day of the London underground bombings.

‘I’m checking the gas company.’

Falcón sprinted through the hospital. People were running, but there was no panic, no shouting. They had been training for this moment. Everyone in a white coat was making for the casualty department. Orderlies were sprinting with empty trolleys. Nurses ran with boxes of saline. Plasma was on the move. Falcón slammed through endless double doors until he hit the main street and the wall of sound: a cacophony of sirens as ambulances swung out into the street.

The main road was miraculously clear of traffic. As he crossed the empty lanes he saw cars pulling up on to pavements. There were no police. This was the work of ordinary citizens, who knew that this stretch of road had to be kept clear to ferry the wounded. Ambulances careered down the street two abreast, whooping and delirious, with lights flashing queasily, in air that was filling with a grey/pink dust and smoke that billowed out from behind the apartment blocks.

At the crossroads bloodstained people stumbled about on their own or were being carried, or walked towards the hospital with handkerchiefs, tissues and kitchen roll held to foreheads, ears and cheeks. These were the superficially wounded victims, the ones sliced by flying glass and metal, the ones some distance from the epicentre, who would never make it into the top flight of disaster statistics but who might lose the sight in an eye, or their hearing from perforated eardrums, bear facial scars for the rest of their lives, lose the use of a finger or a hand, never walk again without a limp. They were being helped by the lucky ones, those who didn’t even have a scratch as the air whistled with flying glass, but who had the images burned on to their minds of someone they knew or loved who had been whole seconds before and was now sliced, torn, bludgeoned or broken.

In the blocks of flats leading up to Calle Los Romeros, the local police were evacuating the buildings. An old man in bloody pyjamas was being led by a boy, who had realized his importance. A young man holding a crimson-flashed towel to the side of his head stared through Falcón, his face horribly partitioned by rivulets of blood, coagulating with dust. He had his arm around his girlfriend, who appeared unhurt and was talking at full tilt into her mobile phone.

The air, more dust-filled by the moment, was still splintering to the sound of breaking glass as it fell from high shattered windows. Falcón called Ramírez again and told him to organize three or four buses to act as improvised ambulances to ferry the lightly wounded from all these blocks of apartments down the road to the hospital.

‘The gas company have confirmed that they supply buildings in that area,’ said Ramírez, ‘but there’s been no report of a leak and they ran a routine test on that block only last month.’

‘For some reason this doesn’t feel like a gas explosion,’ said Falcón.

‘We’re getting reports that a pre-school behind the destroyed building has been badly damaged by flying debris and there are casualties.’

Falcón pressed on up through the walking wounded. There were still no signs of serious damage to buildings, but the people floating around, calling and looking for family members in the spaces at the foot of the emptying apartment blocks were phantasmal, dust-covered, not themselves. The light had turned strange, as the sun was scarfed by smoke and a reddish fog. There was a smell in the air, which was not immediately recognizable to anyone who didn’t know war. It clogged the nostrils with powdered brick and concrete, raw sewage, open drains and a disgusting meatiness. The atmosphere was vibrant, but not with any discernible sound, although people were making noise—talking, coughing, vomiting and groaning—it was more of an airborne tinnitus, brought about by a collective human alarm at the proximity of death.

Lines of fire engines, lights flashing, were backed up all the way to Avenida San Lazaro. There wasn’t a pane of intact glass in the apartment buildings on the other side of Calle Los Romeros. A bottle bank was sticking out of the side of one of the blocks like a huge green plug. A wall that ran down the street opposite the stricken building had been blown on to its back and cars were piled up in a garden, as if it was a scrapyard. The torn stumps of four trees lined the road. Other vehicles parked on Calle Los Romeros were buried under rubble: roofs crumpled, windscreens opaque, tyres blown out, wheel trims off. There were clothes strewn everywhere, as if there’d been a laundry drop from the sky. A length of chain-link fencing hung from a fourth-floor balcony.

Firemen had clambered up the nearest cascade of rubble and had their hoses trained on the two remaining sections of what had been a complete L-shaped building. What was now missing was a twenty-five-metre segment from the middle of it. The colossal explosion had brought down all eight floors of the block, to form a stack of reinforced concrete pancakes to a height of about six metres. Framed by the ragged remains of the eight floors of apartments, and just visible through the mist of falling dust, was the roof of the partially devastated pre-school and the apartment blocks beyond, whose façades were patched with black and gaping glassless windows. A fireman appeared on the edge of a broken room on the eighth floor and in the war-torn air made a sign to show that the building was now clear of people. A bed fell from the sixth floor, its frame crunched into the piled debris, while its mattress bounced off wildly in the direction of the pre-school.

On the other side of the rubble, further down Calle Los Romeros, was the Fire Chief’s car but no sign of any officers. Falcón walked along the collapsed wall and made his way around the block to see what had happened to the pre-school. The end of the building closest to the explosion had lost two walls, part of the roof had collapsed and the rest was hanging, ready to drop. Firemen and civilians were propping the roof, while unblinking women stared on in appalled silence, hands holding their faces as if to stop them from dropping off in disbelief.

On the other side, at the entrance to the school, it was worse. Four small bodies lay side by side, their faces covered with school pinafores. A large group of men and women were trying to control two of the mothers of the dead children. Covered in dust they were like ghosts, fighting for the right to go back to the living. The women were screaming hysterically and clawing madly against hands trying to prevent them from reaching the inert bodies. Another woman had fainted and was lying on the ground, surrounded by people kneeling to protect her from the swaying and surging crowd. Falcón looked around for a teacher and saw a young woman sitting on a mat of broken glass, blood trickling down the side of her face, weeping uncontrollably, while a friend tried to console the inconsolable. A paramedic arrived to give her wounds some temporary dressing.

‘Are you a teacher?’ asked Falcón, of the woman’s friend. ‘Do you know where the mother of the fourth child is?’

The woman, dazed, looked across at the collapsed apartment block.

‘She’s in there somewhere,’ she said, shaking her head.

Only firemen moved around inside the pre-school, their boots crunching over debris and glass. More props came in to support the shattered roof. The Fire Chief was in an undamaged classroom at the back of the school, giving a report to the Mayor’s office on his mobile.

‘All gas and electricity to the area has been cut off and the damaged building has been evacuated. Two fires have been brought under control,’ he said. ‘We’ve pulled four dead children out of the pre-school. Their classroom was in the direct path of the explosion and took its full force. So far we’ve had reports of three other deaths: two men and a woman who were walking along Calle Los Romeros when the explosion occurred. My men have also found a woman who seems to have died from a heart attack in one of the apartment blocks opposite the destroyed building. It’s too difficult to say how many wounded there are at the moment.’

He listened for a moment longer and closed down the phone. Falcón showed his ID.

‘You’re here very early, Inspector Jefe,’ said the Fire Chief.

‘I was in the Forensic Institute. It sounded like a bomb from there. Is that what you think?’

‘To do that sort of damage, there’s no doubt in my mind that it was a bomb, and a very powerful one at that.’

‘Any idea how many people were in that building?’

‘I’ve got one of my officers working on that at the moment. There were at least seven,’ he said. ‘The only thing we can’t be sure of is how many were in the mosque in the basement.’

‘The mosque?’

‘That’s the other reason why I’m sure this was a bomb,’ said the Fire Chief. ‘There was a mosque in the basement, with access from Calle Los Romeros. We think that morning prayers had just finished, but we’re not sure if anyone had left. We’re getting conflicting reports on that from the outside.’

6

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 08.25 hrs

Desperation had brought Consuelo to Calle Vidrio early. The children were being taken to school by her neighbour. Now she was sitting in her car outside Alicia Aguado’s consulting room, getting cold feet about the emergency appointment she’d arranged only twenty-five minutes earlier. She walked the street to calm her nerves. She was not someone who had things wrong with her.

At precisely 8.30 a.m., having stared at the second hand of her watch, chipping away at the seconds—which showed her how obsessive she was becoming—she rang the doorbell. Dr Aguado was waiting for her, as she had been for many months. She was excited at the prospect of this new patient. Consuelo walked up the narrow stairs to the consulting room, which had been painted a pale blue and was kept at a constant temperature of 22°C.

Although Consuelo knew everything about Alicia Aguado, she let the clinical psychologist explain that she was now blind due to a degenerative disease called retinitis pigmentosa and that as a result of this disability she had developed a unique technique of reading a patient’s pulse.

‘Why do you need to do that?’ asked Consuelo, knowing the answer, but wanting to put off the moment when they got down to work.

‘Because I’m blind I miss out on the most important indicators of the human body, which is physiognomy. We speak more to each other with our features and bodies than we do with our mouths. Think how little you would glean from a conversation just by hearing words. Only if someone was in an extreme state, such as fear or anxiety, would you understand what they were feeling, whereas if you have a face and body you pick up on a whole range of subtleties. You can tell the difference between someone who is lying, or exaggerating, someone who’s bored, and someone who wants to go to bed with you. Reading the pulse, which I learnt from a Chinese doctor and have adapted to my needs, enables me to pick up on nuance.’

‘That sounds like an intelligent way of saying that you’re a human polygraph.’

‘I don’t just detect lies,’ said Aguado. ‘It’s more to do with undercurrents. Translating feeling into language can defeat even the greatest of writers, so why should it be any easier for an ordinary person to tell me about their emotions, especially if they’re in a confused state?’

‘This is a beautiful room,’ said Consuelo, already shying away from some of the words she’d heard in Aguado’s explanation. Undercurrents reminded her of her fears, of being dragged out into the ocean to die of exhaustion alone in a vast heaving expanse.

‘There was too much noise,’ said Aguado. ‘You know how it is in Seville. Noise was becoming so much of a distraction for me, in my state, that I had the room double-glazed and soundproofed. It used to be white, but I think my patients found white as intimidating as black. So I opted for tranquil blue. Let’s sit down, shall we?’

They sat in the S-shaped lovers’ seat, facing each other. She showed Consuelo the tape recorder in the armrest, explaining that it was the only way for her to review her consultations. Aguado asked her to introduce herself, give her age and any medication she was on so that she could check it was recording properly.

‘Can you give me a brief medical history?’

‘Since when?’

‘Anything significant since you were born—operations, serious illnesses, children…that sort of thing.’

Consuelo tried to drink the tranquillity of the pale blue walls into her mind. She had been hoping for some miraculous surgical strike on her mental disturbances, a fabulous technique to yank open the tangled mess and smooth it out into comprehensible strands. In her turmoil it hadn’t occurred to her that this was going to be a process, an intrusive process.

‘You seem to be struggling with this question,’ said Aguado.

‘I’m just coming to terms with the fact that you’re going to turn me inside out.’

‘Nothing leaves this room,’ said Aguado. ‘We can’t even be heard. The tapes are locked up in a safe in my office.’

‘It’s not that,’ said Consuelo. ‘I hate to vomit. I would rather sweat out my nausea than vomit up the problem. This is going to be mental vomiting.’

‘Most people who arrive at my side are here because of something intensely private, so private that it might even be a secret from themselves,’ said Aguado. ‘Mental health and physical health are not dissimilar. Untreated wounds fester and infect the whole body. Untreated lesions of the mind are no different. The only difficulty is that you can’t just show me the infected cut. You might not know what, or where, it is. The only way for us to find out is by bringing things from the subconscious to the surface of the conscious mind. It’s not vomiting. It’s not expelling poison. You bring perhaps painful things to the surface, so that we can examine them, but they remain yours. If anything, it’s more like sweating out your nausea than vomiting.’

‘I’ve had two abortions,’ said Consuelo, decisively. ‘The first in 1980, the second in 1984. Both were performed in a London clinic. I have had three children. Ricardo in 1992, Matías in 1994 and Darío in 1998. Those are the only five occasions I have been in hospital.’

‘Are you married?’

‘Not any more. My husband died,’ said Consuelo, stumbling over this first obstacle, used to obfuscation of the fact, rather than natural openness. ‘He was murdered in 2001.’

‘Was that a happy marriage?’

‘He was thirty-four years older than me. I didn’t know this at the time, but he married me because I reminded him physically of his first wife, who had committed suicide. I didn’t want to marry him, but he was insistent. I only agreed when he said that he would give me children. Quite soon after the marriage he found out, or allowed himself to realize, that my likeness to his wife stopped at the physical. We still stayed together. We respected each other, especially in business. He was a diligent father. But as for loving me, making me happy…no.’

‘Did you hear that?’ asked Aguado. ‘Something outside. A big noise, like an explosion.’

‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘I know about your husband’s case, of course,’ said Aguado. ‘It was truly terrible. That must have been very traumatic for you and the children.’

‘It was. But it’s not directly linked to why I’m sitting here,’ said Consuelo. ‘That investigation was necessarily intrusive. I was a prime suspect. He was a wealthy, influential man. I had a lover. The police believed I had a motive. My life was turned inside out by the investigation. Nasty details of my past were revealed.’

‘Such as?’

‘I had appeared in a pornographic movie when I was seventeen to raise money to pay for my first abortion.’

Aguado forced Consuelo to relive that ugly slice of her life in great detail and didn’t let her stop until she’d explained the circumstances of the next pregnancy, with a duke’s son, which had led to the second abortion.

‘What do you think of pornography?’ asked Alicia.

‘I abhor it,’ said Consuelo. ‘I especially abhorred my need to be involved in it, in order to find the money to terminate a pregnancy.’

‘What do you think pornography is?’

‘The filming of the biological act of sex.’

‘Is that all?’

‘It is sex without emotion.’

‘You described quite strong emotions when you were telling me—’

‘Of disgust and revulsion, yes.’

‘For your partners in the movie?’

‘No, no, not at all,’ said Consuelo. ‘We were all in the same boat, us girls. And the men needed us to perform. It’s not a highly sexually charged atmosphere on a porn set. We were all high on dope, to help us get over what we were doing.’

Consuelo’s enthusiasm for her account waned. She wasn’t getting to the point.

‘So who were these strong feelings of anger aimed at?’ asked Aguado.

‘Myself,’ said Consuelo, hoping that this partial truth might be enough.

‘When I asked you what pornography was, I don’t believe you were telling me what you actually thought,’ said Aguado. ‘You were giving me a socially acceptable version. Try answering that question again.’

‘It’s sex without love,’ said Consuelo, hammering the chair. ‘It’s the antithesis of love.’

‘The antithesis of love is hate.’

‘It’s self-hate.’

‘What else?’

‘It’s the desecration of sex.’

‘What do you think of men and women being filmed having sex with multiple partners?’ asked Aguado.

‘It’s perverted.’

‘What else?’

‘What do you mean, “what else”? I don’t know what else you want.’

‘How often have you thought about the movie since it came to light in your husband’s murder investigation?’

‘I forgot about it.’

‘Until today?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘This isn’t a social situation, Sra Jiménez.’

‘I realize that.’

‘You mustn’t be concerned with what I think of you in that respect,’ said Aguado.

‘But I don’t know what you’re trying to get me to admit.’

‘Why are we talking about pornography?’

‘It was something that came to light in my husband’s murder investigation.’

‘I asked you whether your husband’s murder had been traumatic,’ said Aguado.

‘I see.’

‘What do you see?’

‘That the movie coming to light was more traumatic for me than my husband’s death.’

‘Not necessarily. It was bound up in a traumatic event, and in that highly emotionally charged period it made its mark on you.’

Consuelo struggled in silence. The tangled mess was not unravelling but becoming even more confused.

‘You’ve made appointments with me several times recently and you’ve never appeared for them,’ said Aguado. ‘Why did you come this morning?’

‘I love my children,’ said Consuelo. ‘I love my children so much it hurts.’

‘Where does it hurt?’ asked Aguado, leaping on to this new revelation.

‘You’ve never had children?’

Alicia Aguado shrugged.

‘It hurts me in the top of my stomach, around my diaphragm.’

‘Why does it hurt?’

‘Can’t you ever just accept something?’ said Consuelo. ‘I love them. It hurts.’

‘We’re here to examine your inner life. I can’t feel it or see it. All I have to go on is how you express yourself.’

‘And the pulse thing?’

‘That’s what raises the questions,’ said Aguado. ‘What you say and what I feel in your blood don’t always match up.’

‘Are you telling me I don’t love my children?’

‘No, I’m asking you why you say it hurts. What is causing you the pain?’

‘Joder! It’s the fucking love that hurts, you stupid bitch,’ said Consuelo, tearing her wrist away, ripping her blabbing pulse out from under those questioning fingertips. ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. That was unforgivable.’

‘Don’t be sorry,’ said Aguado. ‘This is no cocktail party.’

‘You’re telling me,’ said Consuelo. ‘Look, I’ve always been very firm about telling the truth. My children will confirm that.’

‘This is a different type of truth.’

‘There is only one truth,’ said Consuelo, with missionary zeal.

‘There’s the real truth, and the presentable truth,’ said Aguado. ‘They’re often quite close together, but for a few emotional details.’

‘You’ve got me wrong there, Doctor. I’m not like that. I’ve seen things, I’ve done things and I’ve faced up to them all.’

‘That is why you’re here.’

‘You’re calling me a liar and a coward. You’re telling me I don’t know who I am.’

‘I’m asking questions, and you’re doing your best to answer them.’

‘But you’ve just told me that what I’m saying and what you’re feeling in my pulse don’t match. Therefore, you are calling me a liar.’

‘I think we’ve had enough for today,’ said Aguado. ‘That’s a lot of ground to have covered in the first session. I’d like to see you again very soon. Is this a good time of day for you? The morning or late afternoon is probably the best time in the restaurant business.’

‘You think I’m coming back for any more of this shit?’ said Consuelo, heading for the door, swinging her bag over her shoulder. ‘Think again…blind bitch!’

She slammed the door on the way out and nearly went over on her heel in the cobbled street. She got into her car, jammed the keys into the ignition, but didn’t start the engine. She hung on to the steering wheel, as if it was the only thing that would stop her falling off the edge of her sanity. She cried. She cried until it hurt in exactly the same place as it did when she was watching her children sleeping.

Angel and Manuela were sitting out on the roof terrace in the early-morning sunshine, having breakfast. Manuela sat in a white towelling robe examining her toes. Angel blinked with irritation as he read one of his articles in the ABC.

‘They’ve cut a whole paragraph,’ said Angel. ‘Some stupid sub-editor is making my journalism look like the work of a fool.’

‘I can hear myself getting fat,’ said Manuela, barely thinking, her whole being consumed by the business that was to take place later that morning. ‘I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life in a tracksuit.’

‘I’m wasting my time,’ said Angel. ‘I’m just messing about, writing drivel for idiots. No wonder they cut it.’

‘I’m going to paint my nails,’ said Manuela. ‘What do you think? Pink or red? Or something wild to distract people from my bottom?’

‘That’s it,’ said Angel, tossing the newspaper across the terrace. ‘I’m finished with this shit.’

And that was when they heard it: a distant, but significant, boom. They looked at each other, all immediate concerns gone from their minds. Manuela couldn’t stop herself from saying the obvious.

‘What the hell was that?’

‘That,’ said Angel, getting to his feet so suddenly that the chair collapsed beneath him, ‘was a large explosion.’

‘But where?’

‘The sound came from the north.’

‘Oh shit, Angel! Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!’

‘What?’ said Angel, expecting to see her with red nail polish all over her foot.

‘It can’t possibly have slipped your mind already,’ said Manuela. ‘We’ve been up half the night talking about it. The two properties in the Plaza Moravia—which is north of where we’re standing now.’

‘It wasn’t that close,’ said Angel. ‘That was outside the city walls.’

‘That’s the thing about journalists,’ said Manuela, ‘they’re so used to having their fingers on the pulse that they think they know everything, even how far away an explosion is.’

‘I’d have said…Oh my God. Do you think that was in the Estación de Santa Justa?’

‘That’s east,’ she said, pointing vaguely over the rooftops.

‘North is the Parliament building,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘There won’t be anybody there at this time.’

‘Apart from a few expendable cleaners,’ said Manuela.

Angel stood in front of the TV, flicking from channel to channel, until he found Canal Sur.

‘We have some breaking news of a large explosion to the north of Seville…somewhere in the area of El Cerezo. Eyewitnesses say that an apartment block has been completely destroyed and a nearby pre-school has been badly damaged. We have no reports of the cause of the explosion or the number of casualties.’

‘El Cerezo?’ said Angel. ‘What’s in El Cerezo?’

‘Nothing,’ said Manuela. ‘Cheap apartment blocks. It’s probably a gas explosion.’

‘You’re right. It’s a residential area.’

‘Not every loud noise you hear has to be a bomb.’

‘After March 11th and the London bombings, our minds move in natural directions,’ said Angel, opening up a street map of Seville.

‘Well, you’re always wanting something to happen and now it has. You’d better find out if it was gas or terrorism. But, whatever you do, Angel, don’t give—’

‘El Cerezo is two kilometres from here,’ he said, cutting through her rising hysteria. ‘You said it yourself, it’s a cheap residential area. It’s got nothing to do with what you’re trying to sell in the Plaza Moravia.’

‘If that was a terrorist bomb, it doesn’t matter where it went off…the whole city will be nervous. One of my buyers is a foreigner making an investment. Investors react to this kind of thing. Ask me, if you like—I am one.’

‘Did the Madrid property market crash after March 11th?’ asked Angel. ‘Keep calm, Manuela. It was probably gas.’

‘The bomb could have detonated accidentally while they were preparing it,’ she said. ‘They might have blown themselves up because they realized that they were about to be raided by the police.’

‘Call Javier,’ said Angel, stroking the back of her neck. ‘He’ll know something.’

Falcón called his immediate boss, the Jefe de Brigada de Policía Judicial, Comisario Pedro Elvira, to give his initial report that the Fire Chief was almost certain this level of destruction was caused by a significant bomb, and gave the number of casualties so far.

Elvira had just come out of a meeting with his boss, Seville’s most senior policeman, the Jefe Superior de la Policía de Sevilla, Comisario Andrés Lobo, who had appointed him to lead the entire investigative operation. He also confirmed that the Magistrado Juez Decano de Sevilla had just appointed Esteban Calderón as the Juez de Instrucción in charge of directing the investigation. Three companies had been contacted to supply demolition crews to start removing the rubble and to work with rescue teams, who were already on their way, to try to find any survivors as quickly as possible.

Falcón made a number of requests: aerial photography, before the huge crime scene became too contaminated by the rescue and demolition operation. He also asked for a large police presence to cordon off nearly a square kilometre around the building, so that they could investigate every vehicle in the vicinity. If it was a bomb, it had to have been transported and the vehicle could still be there. When they started searching suspect vehicles they would also need a team of forensics and a unit from the bomb squad. Elvira confirmed everything back to him and hung up.

The Fire Chief was a man in his moment. He’d trained for this terrible day and brought the immediate calamity under control in less than ninety minutes. He accompanied Falcón to the edge of the destruction. On the way he ordered a crew of firemen to stop work on supporting the roof of the destroyed classroom so that the bomb squad could see how the explosion had affected the building. He talked Falcón through the architecture of the destroyed apartment block and how enormous the explosion must have been to blow out the four main supporting pillars for that section. The effect of that would have brought the sudden and phenomenal weight of all the reinforced concrete floors on to the skin walls between each storey. There would have been an accumulative weight and acceleration as each level fell from a greater and greater height.

‘Nobody could have survived that collapse,’ he said. ‘We’re praying for miracles here.’

‘Why are you so certain that this couldn’t have been a gas explosion?’

‘Apart from the fact that there’s been no reported leak, and we’ve only had to deal with two small fires, the mosque in the basement is in daily use. Gas is heavier than air and would accumulate at the lowest point. A large enough quantity of gas couldn’t have accumulated without anybody noticing,’ he said. ‘Added to that, the gas would have had to collect in a big enough space before exploding. Its power would be dissipated. Our main problem would have been incendiary, rather than destruction. There would have been a massive fireball, which would have scorched the whole area. There would have been burns victims. A bomb explodes from a small, confined source. It therefore has far more concentrated destructive power. Only a very large bomb, or several smaller bombs, could have taken out those reinforced concrete supporting pillars. Most of the dead and injured we’ve seen so far have been hit by flying debris and glass. All the windows in the area have been blown out. It’s all consistent with a bomb blast.’

At the edge of the destruction the light was bruised and sickly yellow. The pulverized brick and concrete formed a fine dust, which clogged the throat and nostrils with the stench of decay. From within the stacked floors came the repetitive, desperate sounds of mobile phone jingles, the same customized tunes begging to be answered. Here, rather than being an irritant, they had personality. The Fire Chief shook his head.

‘It’s the worst thing,’ he said, ‘listening to someone else’s hope fading away.’

Falcón almost jumped as his own mobile vibrated against his thigh.

‘Manuela,’ he said, walking away from the Fire Chief.

‘Are you all right, little brother?’ she asked.

‘Yes, but I’m busy.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Just tell me one thing. Was it a bomb?’

‘We’ve had no confirmation—’

‘I don’t want the official communiqué,’ she said. ‘I’m your sister.’

‘I don’t want Angel running off to the ABC with a quote from the Inspector Jefe at the scene.’

‘This is for my ears only.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Just tell me, Javier.’

‘We think it was a bomb.’

‘Fuck.’

Falcón hung up in a fury without saying goodbye. Men, women and children had died and been injured. Families had been destroyed, along with homes and possessions. But Manuela still needed to know which way the property market was going to tip.

7

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 09.45 hrs

A figure sprinted between Falcón and the Fire Chief as he closed down his mobile. The man stumbled into the rubble at the foot of the fallen building, picked himself up and ran at the stacked pancakes of the reinforced concrete floors. His scale was strangely diminished by the vastness of the collapse. He seemed like a puppet as he dithered to the left and right, trying to find a purchase point in the tangle of cracked concrete, bristling steel rods, ruptured netting and shattered brick.

The Fire Chief shouted at him. He didn’t hear. He plunged his hands into the wreckage, swung his body up and hooked his leg over a thick steel rod, but he was a horribly human mixture of crazed strength overwhelmed by futility.

By the time they got to him he was hanging helpless, his palms already torn and bloody, his face distorted by the rawness of his pain. They lifted him off his ghastly perch, like soldiers removing a comrade from the wire of the front line. No sooner had they got him down than he recovered his strength and lunged at the building once more. Falcón had to tackle him around the legs to hold him back. They scrabbled over the rubble, like an ancient articulated insect, until Falcón managed to crawl up the man’s body and clasp his arms to his chest.

‘You can’t go in there,’ he said, his voice rasping from the dust.

The man grunted and flexed his arms against Falcón’s embrace. His mouth was wide open, his eyes stared into the mangled mess of the building and sweat beaded in fat drops on his filthy face.

‘Who do you know who is in there?’ asked Falcón.

On the back of the man’s grunting came two words—wife, daughter.

‘Which floor?’ asked the Fire Chief.

The man looked up at them blinking, as if this question demanded some complicated differential calculus.

‘Gloria,’ said the man. ‘Lourdes.’

‘But which floor?’ asked the Fire Chief.

The man’s head went limp, all fight gone. Falcón released him and rolled him on to his back.

‘Do you know anybody else in there, apart from Gloria and Lourdes?’ asked Falcón.

The man’s head listed to one side, and his dark eyes took in the damaged end of the pre-school. He sat up, got to his feet and trod robotically through the rubble and household detritus between the apartment block and the pre-school. Falcón followed. The man stood at the point where there should have been a wall. The classroom was a turmoil of broken furniture and shards of glass, and on the far wall fluttering in a breeze were children’s paintings—big suns, mad smiles, hair standing on end.

The man’s feet crunched through the glass. He tripped and fell heavily over a twisted desk, but righted himself immediately and made for the paintings. He pulled one off the wall and looked at it with the intensity of a collector judging a masterpiece. There was a tree, a sun, a high building and four people—two big, two small. In the bottom right-hand corner was a name written in an adult hand—Pedro. The man folded it carefully and put it inside his shirt.

The three men went into the main corridor of the school and out through the entrance. The local police had arrived and were trying to clear a path for the ambulance to remove the four bodies of the dead children taken from the destroyed classroom. Two of the mothers kneeling at the feet of their children gave a hysterical howl at this latest development. The third mother had already been taken away.

A woman with a thick white bandage on the side of her face, through which the blood underneath was just beginning to bloom, recognized the man.

‘Fernando,’ she said.

The man turned to her, but didn’t recognize her.

‘I’m Marta, Pedro’s teacher,’ she said.

Fernando had lost the power of speech. He took the painting out of his shirt and pointed at the smallest figure. Marta’s motor reflexes seemed to malfunction and she couldn’t swallow what was in her throat, nor articulate what was in her mind. Instead her face just caved in and she only managed to squeeze out a sound of such brutality and ugliness that it left Fernando’s chest shuddering. It was a sound uncontrolled by any civilizing influence. It was grief in its purest form, before its pain had been made less acute by time or more poignant by poetry. It was a dark, guttural, heaving clot of emotion.

Fernando was not affronted. He folded the painting up and put it back in his shirt. Falcón led him by the arm to the four small bodies. The ambulance was backing up, the rest of the crowd had been squeezed out of the scene. Two paramedics appeared with two body bags each. They worked quickly because they knew the situation would be better with those pitiful bodies removed. Falcón held Fernando around the shoulders as the paramedics uncovered each body and placed it in a body bag. He had to remind Fernando to breathe. At the third body Fernando’s knees buckled and Falcón lowered him to the ground, where he fell forward on to all fours and crawled around, like a poisoned dog looking for a place to die. One of the paramedics shouted and pointed. A TV cameraman had come around the back, through the pre-school, and was filming the bodies. He turned and ran before anybody could react.

The ambulance moved off. The ghostly crowd surged after it and gave up, with a final spasm of grief, before dissolving into groups, with the bereaved women supported from all sides. Television journalists and their cameramen tried to force their way in to talk to the women. They were rebuffed. Falcón pulled Fernando to his feet, pushed him back into the pre-school out of sight, and went to find a policeman to keep journalists away.

Outside a journalist had found a young guy in his twenties, with a couple of bloody nicks in his cheek, who’d been there when the bomb exploded. The camera was right in his face, inches away, the proximity giving the pictures their urgency.

‘…straight after it happened, I mean, the noise…you just can’t believe the loudness of that noise, it was so loud I couldn’t breathe, it was like…’

‘What was it like?’ asked the journalist, an eager young woman, stabbing the microphone back into his face. ‘Tell us. Tell Spain what it was like.’

‘It was like the noise took away all the air.’

‘What was the first thing you noticed after the explosion, after the noise?’

‘Silence,’ he said. ‘Just a deathly quiet. And, I don’t know whether this was in my head or it actually happened, I heard bells ringing…’

‘Church bells?’

‘Yes, church bells, but they were all crazy, as if the shock waves of the explosion were making them ring, you know, at random. It made me sick to hear it. It was as if everything had gone wrong with the world, and nothing would be the same.’

The rest was lost in the clatter and thump of a helicopter’s rotor blades, thrashing away at the dust in the air. It went up higher, to take in the whole scene. This was the aerial photography Falcón had ordered up.

He posted a policeman at the entrance of the school, but found that Fernando had disappeared. He crossed the corridor to the wrecked classroom. Empty. He called Ramírez as he crashed through the broken furniture.

‘Where are you?’ asked Falcón.

‘We’ve just arrived. We’re on Calle Los Romeros.’

‘Is Cristina with you?’

‘We’re all here. The whole squad.’

‘All of you come round to the pre-school now.’

Fernando was back at the wall of rubble and collapsed floors. He threw himself at it like a madman. He tore at the concrete, bricks, window frames and hurled them behind him.

‘…rescue teams working on this side,’ roared Ramírez, over the noise of the helicopter. ‘There are dogs in the wreckage.’

‘Get over here.’

Fernando had grabbed at the steel netting of a shattered reinforced concrete floor. He had his feet braced against the rubble. His neck muscles stood out and his carotid arteries appeared as thick as cord. Falcón pulled him off and they fought for some moments, tripping and floundering about in the dust and rubble until they were ghosts of their former selves.

‘Have you got Gloria’s phone number?’ roared Falcón.

They were panting in the choking atmosphere, their sweating faces caked with grey, white and brown dust, which swirled around them from the chopper’s blades.

The question transfixed Fernando. Despite hearing all these mobile phones ringing, his mind was so paralysed with shock, he hadn’t thought of his own. He ripped it out of his pocket. He squeezed life into the starter button. The helicopter moved off, leaving an immense silence.

Fernando blinked, his brain fluttering like torn flags, trying to remember his PIN. It came to him and he thumbed in Gloria’s number. He stood up from his kneeling position and walked towards the wreckage. He held a hand up as if demanding silence from the world. From his left came the faint, tinny sound of some Cuban piano.

‘That’s her,’ he roared, moving left. ‘She was on this side of the building when…when I last saw her.’

Falcón got to his feet and made a futile attempt to dust himself down just as his homicide squad turned up. He stayed them with his hand and moved towards the tinkling piano, which he recognized as a song called ‘Lágrimas Negras’—Black Tears.

‘She’s there!’ roared Fernando. ‘She’s in there!’

Baena, a junior detective from Falcón’s squad, ran back and fetched a rescue team with a dog. The team pinpointed the spot from where the ringing tone was coming and managed to get Fernando to tell them that his wife and daughter had been on the fifth floor. They gave him steady looks when he released that information. In the face of his radiant hope not one of them had the heart to tell him that the fall, with three storeys coming down on top, meant that, at this moment, they were praying only.

‘She’s in there,’ he said, to their still, expressionless faces. ‘That mobile is always with her. She’s a sales rep. “Lágrimas Negras” was her favourite song.’

Falcón nodded to Cristina Ferrera and they guided Fernando back to the pre-school and got a nurse to clean him up and dress his cuts. Falcón called the homicide squad into the school latrines. He washed his hands and face and looked at them in the mirror.

‘This is going to be the most complicated investigation that any of us have ever been involved in, and that includes me,’ said Falcón. ‘Nothing is straightforward in terrorist attacks. We know that from what happened on March 11th in Madrid. There are going to be a lot of people involved—the CNI’s intelligence agents, the CGI’s antiterrorist squad, the bomb disposal teams and us—and that’s just on the investigative side. What we’ve got to do is keep it clear in our minds what we, as the homicide squad, are trying to achieve. I’ve already asked for a police cordon to keep the site clear for us.’

‘They’re in place,’ said Ramírez. ‘They’re working on getting the journalists out.’

Falcón turned to face them, shaking his wet hands.

‘By now you all know that there was a mosque in the basement of that block. Our job is not to speculate on what happened and why. Our job is to find out who went into that mosque, and who came out, and what went on inside it in the last twenty-four hours, and then forty-eight hours, and so on. We do that by talking to every possible witness we can find. Our other crucial task is to find out about every vehicle in the vicinity. The bomb was big. It would have had to be transported to this place. If that vehicle is still here, we have to find it.

‘At the moment the first task is going to be difficult, with all the occupants of the apartments evacuated from their buildings. So our priority is to identify all vehicles and their owners. José Luis will divide you up and you will search every sector, starting with cars closest to the collapsed building. Cristina, you’ll stay with me for the moment.

‘And remember, everybody here is suffering in some way, whether they’ve lost somebody or seen them injured, whether they’ve had their home destroyed or their windows smashed. You’ve got a heavy workload and you’re going to be under a lot of pressure, with or without the media on your backs. You’ll get more information by being sensitive and understanding than by treating this as the usual process. You’re all good people, which is why you’re in the homicide squad—now go out there and find out what happened.’

They filed out. Ferrera stayed behind. Falcón washed his hair under the tap and then wiped his face and hands.

‘His name is Fernando. His wife and daughter were in the collapsed apartment block, his son was one of the children killed in the blast. Find out if he has any other family and, if not, any close friends. Not anybody will do. He left home after his breakfast to find out, half an hour later, that he’s lost everything. When it comes home to him, he’s going to lose his mind.’

‘And you want me to stay with him?’

‘I can’t afford that. I want you to make sure he’s safely delivered into the hands of a trauma team, who should be along any minute. He needs his predicament explained, he’s lost the ability to articulate. He’ll want to stay here until the bodies are found. But don’t lose track of him. I want to know where he ends up.’

They left the latrines. A bomb squad team was picking its way through the shattered classroom, like mineral fossickers looking for valuable rocks. They filled polypropylene sacks with their finds. There were two more teams outside, working furiously so that the machinery could move in to start the demolition task and the search for survivors.

Cristina Ferrera went into the classroom where the nurse was just finishing dressing Fernando’s cuts. She knew why Falcón had chosen her for this job. The nurse was doing her best with Fernando, but he wasn’t responding, his brain was teeming with bigger, darker fish. The nurse finished and packed up. Cristina asked her to send someone from a trauma team as soon as possible. She sat on a chair by the blackboard, at some distance from Fernando. She didn’t want to crowd him, even though it was obvious that he was living inside his head at an intensity that excluded the outside world. Grief darkened, as quickly as hope lightened, his face, like clouds passing over fields.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, after some minutes, as if noticing her for the first time.

‘I’m a policewoman. My name is Cristina Ferrera.’

‘There was a man before. Who was he?’

‘That was my boss, Javier Falcón. He’s the Inspector Jefe of the homicide squad.’

‘He’s got some work on his hands.’

‘He’s a good man,’ said Ferrera. ‘An unusual man. He’ll get to the bottom of it.’

‘We all know who it is, though, don’t we?’

‘Not yet.’

‘The Moroccans.’

‘It’s too early to say.’

‘You ask around. We’ve all thought about it. Ever since March 11th we’ve watched them going in there and we’ve been waiting.’

‘Into the mosque, you mean? The mosque in the basement.’

‘That’s right.’

‘They’re not all Moroccans who go to mosques, you know. Plenty of Spaniards have converted to Islam.’

‘I work in construction,’ he said, uninterested in her balanced approach. ‘I put together buildings like that. Much better buildings than that. I work with steel.’

‘In Seville?’

‘Yes, I build apartments for rich young professionals…that’s what I’m told anyway.’

Fernando’s head had been turned upside down and now he was trying to put the furniture straight. Except that, occasionally, he noticed the furniture’s emptiness and it tipped his mind back into the abyss of loss and grief. He tried to talk about building work but got lost in moments of imagination as he saw his wife and daughter falling through steel and concrete. He wanted to get out of himself, out of his body and head and into…where? Where could the mind go for respite? A helicopter battering the air overhead knocked his thoughts into another pattern.

‘Do you have children?’ he asked.

‘A boy and a girl,’ she said.

‘How old?’

‘The boy’s sixteen. The girl’s fourteen.’

‘Good kids,’ he said; not a question, more of a hope.

‘They’re both being difficult at the moment,’ she said. ‘Their father died about three years ago. It’s not been easy for them.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but wanting her tragedy to bury his own for a while. ‘How did he die?’

‘He died of a rare type of cancer.’

‘That’s hard for your kids. Fathers are good for them at that age,’ he said. ‘They like to try things out on their mothers to give themselves the confidence to rebel against the world. That’s what Gloria told me, anyway. They need fathers to show them it’s not as easy as they think.’

‘You might be right.’

‘Gloria says I’m a good father.’

‘Your wife…’

‘Yes, my wife,’ he said.

‘Can you tell me about your own kids?’ she asked.

He couldn’t. There were no words for them. He measured them out with a hand up from the floor, he pointed out of the window at the destroyed apartment block, and finally he pulled the painting out from his shirt. That said it all—sticks and triangles, a tall rectangle with windows, a round green tree and behind it a massive orange sun in a blue sky.

A colossal crane arrived, preceded by a bulldozer, which cleared the land in between the destroyed block and the pre-school. Two tipper trucks manoeuvred around the back of the crane and a digger began to scoop rubble and dump it in the tippers. In the cleared land the crane settled its feet and a team of men in yellow hard hats began preparing the rig.

Around the front of the building, on Calle Los Romeros, a change of clothes had arrived from the Jefatura for Falcón. The rest of the homicide squad were busy working with the local police, identifying vehicles and their owners. Comisario Elvira had turned up in full uniform and was being given a tour of the site by the Fire Chief. As he moved around, his assistant called all the team leaders involved in the operation to a meeting in one of the classrooms in the pre-school. As the entourage headed for the pre-school a woman approached Elvira and gave him a list with twelve names on it.

‘And who are these people?’ asked Elvira.

‘They are the names of all the men in the mosque at the time of the explosion not including the Imam, Abdelkrim Benaboura,’ she said. ‘My name is Esperanza. I’m Spanish. My partner, who is also Spanish, was in the mosque. I represent the wives, mothers and girlfriends of these men. We are in hiding. The women, especially the Moroccan women, are scared that people may think that their husbands and sons were in some way responsible for what has happened. There’s a mobile number on the back of the list. We would ask you to call us when you have some news of their…of anything.’

She moved away, and the pressure of time and lack of personnel meant that Elvira let her go unfollowed. Calderón made his way through the crowd to Falcón.

‘I didn’t realize it was you, Javier,’ he said, shaking him by the hand. ‘How did you get into that state?’

‘I had to stop someone from throwing himself into the wreckage to rescue his wife and daughter.’

‘So, this is the big one,’ said Calderón, not bothering to engage with what Falcón had said. ‘It’s finally happened to us.’

They continued to the school, where the police, judges, fire brigade, bomb squad, rescue services, trauma units, medical services and demolition gangs were all represented. Elvira made it clear that nobody was allowed to say a word until he had delivered the plan of action. To focus their attention he asked the leader of the bomb squad to give a brief report on the initial analyses of fragments from the blast. They showed that the apartment block had been devastated by a bomb of extraordinary power, most probably situated in the basement of that section of the building, and whose explosive was probably of military, rather than commercial, quality. This expert opinion silenced the assembled company completely and Elvira was able to hammer out a coordinated plan in about forty minutes.

At the end of the meeting Ramírez headed Falcón off as he was making for the latrines to change his clothes.

‘We’ve got something,’ he said.

‘Talk me through it while I change.’

As soon as he was dressed, Falcón found Comisario Elvira and Juez Calderón, and asked Ramírez to repeat what he’d just told him.

‘In the immediate vicinity of the building, excluding vehicles buried in the rubble, we’ve found three stolen cars plus this van,’ said Ramírez. ‘It’s parked right outside the pre-school here. It’s a Peugeot Partner, registered in Madrid. There’s a copy of the Koran on the front seat. We can’t see in the back because it’s a closed van and the rear windows have been shattered, but the owner of the vehicle is a man called Mohammed Soumaya.’

8

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 11.35 hrs

The car park was directly behind the destroyed building and next to the pre-school. There were some trees, which provided a canopy to a sitting area near Calle Blanca Paloma on one side and a five-storey apartment block on the other. There was only one access road to the car park. While Calderón, Elvira, Falcón and Ramírez made for the Peugeot Partner, Elvira’s assistant logged on to the police terror suspects list and entered Mohammed Soumaya’s details. He was in the lowest risk category, which meant that he had no known connections to any body, organization or persons with either terror or radical Islamic background. The only reason he was on the list was that he fitted the most basic terrorist profile: under forty years of age, a devout Muslim and single. Elvira’s assistant entered the names from the list of all the men in the mosque at the time of the explosion, which had been given by the Spanish woman, Esperanza. There was no Mohammed Soumaya among them. He patched the names through to the CNI—the Spanish intelligence agency.

Two breakdown vehicles were working in the car park to remove cars whose owners had been identified and screened. Most of these cars had windows smashed and bodywork damage from flying debris. The Peugeot Partner’s two rear windows were opaque with shattered glass and the rear doors were dented. The side windows were clear and the windscreen, which had been facing away from the explosion, was intact. The copy of the Koran, a new Spanish edition, was visible on the front passenger seat. Two forensics in white hooded boiler suits and latex gloves were standing by. There was a discussion about booby traps and a bomb squad team was called over, along with a dog handler. The dog found nothing interesting around the car. The underside and engine compartment were inspected and found clear. The bomb squad man picked the glass out of one of the smashed rear windows and inspected inside. The rear doors were opened and shots taken of the empty interior and its carpeted floor. A fine, crystalline, white powder, which covered an area of about 30 cm by 20 cm, had been spilled on the floor. The excited sniffer dog leapt in and immediately sat down by the powder. One of the forensics took a hand-held vacuum cleaner with a clear plastic flask attached and hoovered up the powder. The flask was removed from the vacuum cleaner, capped and given an evidence number.

The forensics moved round to the front of the car and bagged the new copy of the Koran, whose spine was unbroken. In the glove compartment they found another copy of the Koran. This was a heavily used Spanish translation, with copious notes in the margins; it proved to be exactly the same edition as the one found on the front seat. This was bagged, as were the vehicle documents. Falcón took a note of the ISBN and bar codes of both books. Under the passenger seat was an empty mineral water bottle and a black cotton sack, which contained a carefully folded green-and-white sash whose length was covered in Arabic writing. There was also a black hood with eye and mouth holes.

‘Let’s not get too excited until we’ve had an analysis of that powder in the back,’ said Calderón. ‘His occupation is “shop owner”, it could just as easily be sugar.’

‘Not if my dog sat down next to it,’ said the bomb squad man. ‘He’s never wrong.’

‘We’d better get in touch with Madrid and have someone visit Mohammed Soumaya’s home and business premises,’ said Falcón, and Ramírez moved off to make the call. ‘We want detail about his movements over the last forty-eight hours, as well.’

‘You’re going to have a job on your hands just to find all these people who had a view of this car park, and the front and rear of the destroyed building,’ said Calderón. ‘As the bomb squad guy said, it was a big bomb, which means a lot of explosive arrived here, possibly in small lots and maybe from a number of different suppliers, and at different times.’

‘We’re going to need to know whether the mosque, or any of the people in the mosque, were the subject of surveillance by the CGI’s antiterrorist squad or the CNI’s intelligence agents and, if they were, we’d like that information,’ said Falcón. ‘And, by the way, where are they? I didn’t see anybody from the CGI in that meeting.’

‘The CNI are on their way down here now,’ said Elvira.

‘And the CGI?’ asked Calderón.

‘They’re in lockdown,’ said Elvira, quietly.

‘What does that mean?’ said Calderón.

‘It will be explained to us when the CNI get here,’ said Elvira.

‘How much longer will it be before the fire brigade and the bomb squad can declare all these apartment blocks surrounding the destroyed building safe?’ asked Falcón. ‘At least if people can come back to their homes we’ve got a chance of building up our information quickly.’

‘They know that,’ said Elvira, ‘and they’ve told me that they should be letting people back in within the next few hours, as long as they don’t find anything else. In the meantime a contact number’s been issued to the press, TV and radio for people to call in with information.’

‘Except that they don’t know of the Peugeot Partner’s importance yet,’ said Falcón. ‘We’re not going to get anywhere until people get back into their apartments.’

The Mayor, who’d been stuck in traffic as the city had ground to a halt, finally arrived in the car park. He was joined by ministers of the Andalucían Parliament, who had just come from the hospital where they’d been filmed talking to some of the victims. A gaggle of journalists had been allowed through the police cordon and they gathered around the officials, while camera crews set up their equipment, with the destruction providing the devastating backdrop. Elvira went across to the Mayor to give his situation report and was intercepted by his own assistant. They talked. Elvira pointed him across to Falcón.

‘Only three of the twelve names given to us on that list appear on the terror suspect database,’ said the assistant, ‘and they’re all in the lowest risk category. Five of the twelve were over sixty-five. Morning prayers isn’t such a popular time with the young, as most people have to get to work.’

‘Not exactly the classic profile of a terrorist cell,’ said Falcón. ‘But then we don’t know who else was in there yet.’

‘How many under the age of thirty-five?’ asked Calderón.

‘Four,’ said the assistant, ‘and of those, two are brothers, one of whom is severely disabled in a wheelchair, and another is a Spanish convert called Miguel Botín.’

‘And the remaining three?’

‘Four, including the Imam, who isn’t on the list the woman gave us. He’s fifty-five and the other three are in their forties. Two of them are claiming disability benefit from the state after suffering industrial accidents, and the third is another Spanish convert.’

‘Well, they don’t sound like a special forces unit, do they?’ said Calderón.

‘There is one interesting point. The Imam is on the terror suspect database. He’s been in Spain since September 2004, arriving from Tunis.’

‘And before that?’

‘That’s the point. I don’t have the clearance for that level of information. Maybe the Comisario does,’ he said, and went to rejoin the media scrum around the Mayor.

‘How can somebody be in a low-risk category and yet have a higher level of clearance for his history?’ asked Ramírez.

‘Let’s look at the certainties, or the almost certainties,’ said Juez Calderón. ‘We have a bomb explosion, whose epicentre seems to be the mosque in the basement of the building. We have a van belonging to Mohammed Soumaya, a low-risk category terrorist—who we are not sure was in the building at the time of the blast. His van bears traces of explosive, according to the bomb squad dog. We have a list of twelve people in the mosque at the time, plus the Imam. Only three, plus the Imam, make it on to a list of low-risk category terror suspects. We are investigating the deaths of four children in the pre-school and three people outside the apartment block at the time of the explosion. Anything else?’

‘The hood, the sash, the two copies of the Koran,’ said Ramírez.

‘We should get all those notes in the margins of the used copy of the Koran looked at by an expert,’ said Calderón. ‘Now, what are the questions we want answered?’

‘Did Mohammed Soumaya drive this van here? If not, who did? If that powder is confirmed as explosive then what was it, why was it being gathered here, and why did it detonate?’ said Falcón. ‘While we wait to hear from Madrid about Soumaya we’ll build up a picture of what happened in and around this mosque over the last week. We can start by asking people whether they remember this van arriving, how many people were in it, did they see it being unloaded and so on. Can we get a shot of Soumaya?’

Ramírez, who was on the phone again, trying to sort out someone to look at the copy of the Koran, nodded and twirled an index finger to show that he was on to it. A policewoman came from the wreckage site and informed Calderón that the first body in the collapsed building had been found—an old woman on the eighth floor. They agreed to reconvene in a couple of hours. Ramírez came off the phone as Cristina Ferrera arrived from the pre-school.

It was agreed that Ramírez would continue working on the vehicle identification with Sub-Inspector Pérez, Serrano and Baena. Falcón and Cristina Ferrera would start trying to find the occupants of the five-storey apartment building with the best view of the car park where the Peugeot Partner had been left. They went down the street towards the police cordon where a group of people had gathered, waiting to be able to get back into their apartments.

‘How was Fernando by the time you left him?’ asked Falcón. ‘I didn’t catch his surname.’

‘Fernando Alanis,’ she said. ‘He was more or less under control, considering what had happened to him. We’ve exchanged numbers.’

‘Has he got anybody he can go to?’

‘Not in Seville,’ she said. ‘His parents are up north and too old and sick. His sister lives in Argentina. His wife’s family didn’t approve of the marriage.’

‘Friends?’

‘His life was his family,’ she said.

‘Does he know what he’s going to do?’

‘I’ve told him he can come and stay with me.’

‘You didn’t have to do that, Cristina. He’s not your responsibility.’

‘You knew I’d offer though, didn’t you, Inspector Jefe?’ she said. ‘If the situation demanded it.’

‘I was going to put him up at my place,’ said Falcón. ‘You’ve got to go to work, the kids…you don’t have any room.’

‘He needs a sense of what he’s lost,’ she said. ‘And who’d look after him at your place?’

‘My housekeeper,’ said Falcón. ‘You won’t believe me, but I really did not intend for that to happen.’

‘We have to pull together or we let them win by falling apart,’ she said. ‘And you always choose me for this type of work—once a nun always a nun.’

‘I don’t remember saying that.’

‘But you remember thinking it, and didn’t you say that we weren’t just foot soldiers in the fight against crime,’ said Ferrera, ‘but that we’re here to help as well. We’re the crusading detectives of Andalucía.’

‘José Luis would laugh in your face if he heard you say that,’ said Falcón. ‘And you should be very wary of using words like that in this investigation.’

‘Fernando was already accusing “the Moroccans”,’ she said. ‘Ever since March 11th they’ve been watching them go into that mosque and wondering.’

‘That’s the way people’s minds naturally work these days, and they like to have their suspicions confirmed,’ said Falcón. ‘We can’t take their prejudices into this investigation. We have to examine the facts and keep them divorced from any natural assumptions. If we don’t, we’ll make the sort of mistakes they made right from the beginning in the Madrid bombings when they blamed ETA. Already there are confusing aspects to the evidence that we’ve found in the Peugeot Partner.’

‘Explosives, copies of the Koran and a green sash and black hood don’t sound confusing to me,’ said Ferrera.

‘Why two copies of the Koran? One brand-new cheap Spanish edition and the other heavily used and annotated, but exactly the same edition.’

‘The extra copy was a gift?’

‘Why leave it in full view on the front seat? This is Seville, people usually leave their cars completely empty,’ said Falcón. ‘We need more information on these books. I want you to find out where they were bought and if there was a credit card or cheque used.’

He tore the page from his notebook with the ISBNs and bar codes, recopied them and gave Ferrera the torn page.

‘What are we trying to find out from the occupants of this apartment block?’

‘Keep it simple. Everybody’s in shock. If we can find witnesses we’ll bring them to this car park, ask whether they saw the Peugeot Partner arrive, if they saw anybody getting out of it, how many, what age and if they took anything out of the back.’

At the police cordon Falcón called out the address of the apartment block. An old man in his seventies came forward and a woman in her forties with a bruised face and a plastered arm in a sling. Falcón took the old man, Ferrera the woman. As they passed the entrance to their block a bomb squad man and a fireman confirmed that the building was now clear. Falcón showed the old man the Peugeot Partner and took him back up to his thirdfloor apartment, where the living room and kitchen were covered in glass, all the blinds in shreds, the chairs fallen over, photographs on the floor and the soft furniture lacerated, with brown foam already protruding from the holes.

The old man had been lying on his bed in the back of the apartment. His son and daughter-in-law had already left for work, with the kids, who were too old for the pre-school, so nobody had been hurt. He stood in the midst of his wrecked home with his left hand shaking and his old, rheumy eyes taking it all in.

‘So you’re here on your own all day,’ said Falcón.

‘My wife died last November,’ he said.

‘What do you do with yourself?’

‘I do what old guys do: read the paper, take a coffee, look at the kids playing in the pre-school. I wander about, talk to people and choose the best time to smoke the three cigarettes I allow myself every day.’

Falcón went to the window and pulled the ruined blinds away.

‘Do you remember seeing that van?’

‘The world is full of small white vans these days,’ said the old man. ‘So I can’t be sure whether I saw the same van twice, or different vans in two separate instances. On the way to the pharmacy I saw the van for the first time, driving from left to right down Calle Los Romeros, with two people in the front. It pulled into the kerb by the mosque and that was it.’

‘What time?’

‘About ten thirty yesterday morning.’

‘And the next time?’

‘About fifteen minutes later on the way back from the pharmacy I saw a white van pull into the parking area, but not in that spot. It was on the other side, facing away from us, and only one guy got out.’

‘Did you see him clearly?’

‘He was dark. I’d have said he was Moroccan. There are a lot of them around here. He had a round head, close-cropped hair, prominent ears.’

‘Age?’

‘About thirty. He looked fit. He had a tight black T-shirt on and he was muscled. I think he was wearing jeans and trainers. He locked the car and went off through the trees to Calle Blanca Paloma.’

‘Did you see the van when it arrived in the position it is now?’

‘No. All I can tell you is that it was there by six thirty in the evening. My daughter-in-law parked next to it. I also remember that when I went for coffee after lunch the van had left its position on the other side. There aren’t so many cars during the day, except for the ones belonging to teachers lined up in front of the school, so I don’t know how, but I noticed it. Old guys notice different things to other people.’

‘And there were two men when it was going along Calle Los Romeros?’

‘That’s why I can’t be sure if it was the same van.’

‘On which side of the van did your daughter-in-law park her car?’

‘To the left as we’re looking at it,’ said the old man. ‘Her door was blown open by the wind and knocked into it.’

‘Did the van move again at all?’

‘No idea. Once people are around me I don’t notice a thing.’

Falcón took the daughter-in-law’s name and number and called her as he walked upstairs. He talked her through the conversation he’d just had with her father-in-law and asked her if she’d had a look at the van when her door had knocked into it.

‘I checked it, just to make sure I hadn’t dented it.’

‘Did you glance in the window?’

‘Probably.’

‘Did you see anything on the front passenger seat?’

‘No, nothing.’

‘You didn’t see a book?’

‘Definitely not. It was just a dark seat.’

Ferrera was coming out of the fourth-floor apartment as he hung up. They went downstairs in silence.

‘Was your witness injured in the blast?’ asked Falcón.

‘She says she fell down the stairs last night, but she’s got no bruises on her arms or legs, just the ones on her face,’ said Ferrera angrily. ‘And she was scared.’

‘Not of you.’

‘Yes, of me. Because I ask questions, and one question leads to another, and if any of it somehow gets back to her husband it’s another reason for him to beat her.’

‘You can only help the ones that want to be helped,’ said Falcón.

‘There seems to be more of it about these days,’ said Ferrera, exasperated. ‘Anyway, she did see the van arrive in its current position. There’s a woman on the same shift at the factory where she works, who lives in one of the blocks further down her street. They meet for a chat under the trees on Calle Blanca Paloma. They walked past the van at 6 p.m. just as it had arrived. Two guys got out. They were talking in Arabic. They didn’t take anything out of the back. They went up to Calle Los Romeros and turned right.’

‘Descriptions?’

‘Both late twenties. One with a shaved head, black T-shirt. The other with more of a square head, with black hair, cut short at the sides and combed back on top. She said he was very good looking, but had bad teeth. He wore a faded denim jacket, white T-shirt, and she remembers he had very flashy trainers.’

‘Did she see the van move again from that position?’

‘She keeps an eye on this car park, looking out for when her husband comes home. She said it hadn’t moved by the time he came in at 9.15 p.m.’

The police were letting people through the cordon so that they could get back into their homes to start clearing up the damage. There was a large crowd gathered outside the chemist’s at the junction of Calle Blanca Paloma with Calle Los Romeros. They were angry with the police for not letting them back into any part of the block attached to the destroyed building, which was still too dangerous. Falcón tried talking to people in the crowd, but they couldn’t give a damn about Peugeot Partners.

Pneumatic drills started up on the other side of the block. Falcón and Ferrera crossed Calle Los Romeros to another apartment building, whose glass was more or less intact. The apartments on the first two floors were still empty. On the third floor a child led Falcón into a living room, where a woman was sweeping up glass around a pile of cardboard boxes. She had moved in at the weekend but the removal company hadn’t been able to deliver until yesterday. He asked his question about the white van and the two guys.

‘Do you think I’d be sitting on the balcony watching the traffic with all this lot to unpack?’ she said. ‘I’ve had to give up two days’ work because these people can’t deliver on time.’

‘Do you know who was in here before you?’

‘It was empty,’ she said. ‘Nobody had been living here for three months. The letting agency on Avenida San Lazaro said we were the first to see it.’

‘Was there anything left here when you first arrived?’ asked Falcón, looking out of the living-room balcony on to Calle Los Romeros and the rubble of the destroyed building.

‘There was no furniture, if that’s what you mean,’ she said. ‘There was a sack of rubbish in the kitchen.’

‘What sort of rubbish?’

‘People have been killed. Children have been killed,’ she said, aghast, pulling her own child to her side. ‘And you’re asking me what sort of rubbish I found here when I moved in?’

‘Police work can seem like a mysterious business,’ said Falcón. ‘If you can remember noticing anything it might help.’

‘As it happens, I had to tie the bag up and throw it out, so I know that it was a pizza carton, a couple of beer cans, some cigarette butts, ash and empty packets and a newspaper, the ABC, I think. Anything else?’

‘That’s very good, because now we know that, although this place was empty for three months, somebody had been here, spending quite some time in this apartment, and that could be interesting for us.’

He crossed the landing to the apartment opposite. A woman in her sixties lived there.

‘Your new neighbour has just told me that her apartment had been empty for the last three months,’ he said.

‘Not quite empty,’ she said. ‘When the previous family moved out, about four months ago, some very smart businessmen came round, on maybe three or four occasions. Then, about three months ago, a small van turned up and unloaded a bed, two chairs and a table. Nothing else. After that, young men would turn up in pairs, and spend three or four hours at a time during the day, doing God knows what. They never spent the night there, but from dawn until dusk there was always someone in that apartment.’

‘Did the same guys come back again, or were they different every time?’

‘I think there might have been as many as twenty.’

‘Did they bring anything with them?’

‘Briefcases, newspapers, groceries.’

‘Did you ever talk to them?’

‘Of course. I asked them what they were doing and they just said that they were having meetings,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t that worried. They didn’t look like druggies. They didn’t play loud music or have parties; in fact, quite the opposite.’

‘Did their routine change over the months?’

‘Nobody came during Semana Santa and the Feria.’

‘Did you ever see inside the apartment when they were there?’

‘In the beginning I offered them something to eat, but they always very politely refused. They never let me inside.’

‘And they never let on about what these meetings were about?’

‘They were such straight, conservative young men, I thought they might be a religious group.’

‘What happened when they left?’

‘One day a van arrived and took away the furniture and that was it.’

‘When was that?’

‘Last Friday…the second of June.’

Falcón called Ferrera and told her to keep at it while he went to talk to the letting agency down the street on Avenida de San Lazaro.

The woman in the letting agency had been responsible for selling the property three months ago and renting it out at the end of last week. It had not been bought by a private buyer but a computer company called Informáticalidad. All her dealings were through the Financial Director, Pedro Plata.

Falcón took down the address. Ramírez called him as he was walking back up Calle Los Romeros towards the bombed building.

‘Comisario Elvira has just told me that the Madrid police have picked up Mohammed Soumaya at his shop. He lent the van to his nephew. He was surprised to hear that it was in Seville. His nephew had told him he was just going to use it for some local deliveries,’ said Ramírez. ‘They’re following up on the nephew now. His name is Trabelsi Amar.’

‘Are they sending us shots of him?’

‘We’ve asked for them,’ said Ramírez. ‘By the way, they’ve just installed an Arabic speaker in the Jefatura, after receiving more than a dozen calls from our friends across the water. They all say the same thing and the translation is: “We will not rest until Andalucía is back in the bosom of Islam.”’

‘Have you ever heard of a company called Informáticalidad?’ asked Falcón.

‘Never,’ said Ramírez, totally uninterested. ‘There’s one last bit of news for you. They’ve identified the explosive found in the back of the Peugeot Partner. It’s called cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘Otherwise known as RDX. Research and Development Explosive,’ said Ramírez, in a wobbly English accent. ‘Its other names are cyclonite and hexogen. It’s top-quality military explosive—the sort of thing you’d find in artillery shells.’

9

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 12.45 hrs

Ferrera had found one occupant who’d given her a sighting of the Peugeot Partner late yesterday afternoon, Monday 5th June. The van had stopped on Calle Los Romeros, opposite the mosque, and two men had unloaded four cardboard boxes and some blue plastic carrier bags. The only description of the men was that they were young and well built and were wearing T-shirts and jeans. The boxes were heavy enough that they could only be carried one at a time. Everything was taken into the mosque. Both men came out and drove away in the van. Falcón told her to keep looking for witnesses and if necessary to go down to the hospital.

Back in the car park the Mayor and the deputies from the Andalucían Parliament had gone and Comisario Elvira and Juez Calderón were coming to the end of an impromptu press conference. Another body had been found on the seventh floor. The rescue workers had not made contact with anybody alive in the rubble. Pneumatic drills were being used to expose the steel netting in the reinforced concrete floors and oxyacetylene torches and motorized cutters were breaking up the floors into slabs. These slabs were being lifted away by the crane and put into tippers. With each piece of information given, more questions came at them. Elvira was visibly irritated by it all, but Calderón was playing at the top of his game and the journalists loved him. They were more than happy to concentrate on the good-looking, charismatic Calderón when finally Elvira took his leave and headed into the pre-school, where they’d set up a temporary headquarters in the undamaged classrooms at the back.

The journalists recognized Falcón and came after him, preventing him from following Elvira. Microphones butted his face. Cameras were thrust between heads. What’s the name of the explosive again? Where did it come from? Are the terrorists still alive? Is there a cell still operating in Seville? What have you got to say about the evacuations in the city centre? Has there been another bomb? Has anybody claimed responsibility for the attack? Falcón had to force his way out of the scrum and it took three policemen to push the journalists back from the pre-school entrance. Falcón was straightening himself up in the corridor when Calderón burst through the roaring crowd at the gates.

‘Joder,’ he said, remaking his tie, ‘they’re like a pack of jackals.’

‘Ramírez just told me about the explosive.’

‘They keep asking me about that. I haven’t heard anything.’

‘The common name is RDX or hexogen.’

‘Hexogen?’ said Calderón. ‘Wasn’t that what the Chechen rebels used to blow up those apartment blocks in Moscow back in 1999?’

‘The military use it in artillery shells.’

‘I remember there was some scandal about the Chechens using recycled explosives from a government scientific research institute, which had been bought by the mafia, who then sold it to the rebels. Russian military ordnance being used to blow up their own people.’

‘Sounds like a typical Russian scenario.’

‘It’s not going to be easy for you,’ said Calderón. ‘Hexogen can come from anywhere—Russia, a Muslim Chechen terrorist group, an arms dump in Iraq, any Third World country where there’s been a conflict, where ordnance has been left behind. It might even be American, this stuff.’

Falcón’s mobile vibrated. It was Elvira, calling them into a meeting with the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia and the antiterrorist squad of the Comisaría General de Información.

There were three men from the CNI. The boss was a man in his sixties, with white hair and dark eyebrows and a handsome, ex-athlete’s face. He introduced himself only as Juan. His two juniors, Pablo and Gregorio, were younger men, who had the bland appearance of middle managers. In their dark suits they were barely distinguishable, although Pablo had a scar running from his hairline to his left eyebrow. Falcón was uncomfortably aware that Pablo had not taken his eyes off him since he’d walked into the room. He began to wonder whether they’d met before.

There was only one representative from the antiterrorism unit of the CGI. His name was Inspector Jefe Ramón Barros, a short, powerfully built man, with close-cropped grey hair and perfect teeth, which added a sinister element to his brutal and furious demeanour.

Comisario Elvira asked Falcón to give a résumé of his findings so far. He started with the immediate aftermath of the bomb and moved on quickly to the discovery of the Peugeot Partner, its contents, and the times it was seen by witnesses in the car park.

‘We’ve since discovered that the fine white powder taken from the rear of the van is a military explosive known as hexogen, which my colleague, Juez Calderón, has told me was the same type of explosive used by Chechen rebels to blow up two apartment blocks in Moscow in 1999.’

‘You can’t believe everything you read in the newspapers,’ said Juan. ‘There’s considerable doubt now that it was the Chechen rebels. We’re not great believers in conspiracy theories in our own back yard, but when it comes to Russia it seems that anything is possible. There is a natural inclination, after such a catastrophic attack as this, to make comparisons to other terrorist attacks, to look for patterns. What we’ve learnt from the mistakes we made after March 11th is that there are no patterns. It’s the government’s business to quell panic by offering some kind of order to a terrified public. It’s our job to treat every situation as unique. Carry on, Inspector Jefe.’

None of the Sevillanos liked this patronizing little speech and they looked at the CNI man in his expensive loafers, lightweight suit and stiff, heavy, silvery tie and decided that the only thing he’d said that didn’t mark him out as a typical visiting Madrileño was his admission of a mistake.

‘If it wasn’t Chechen rebels, who was it?’ asked Calderón.

‘Not relevant, Juez Calderón,’ said Juan. ‘Proceed, Inspector Jefe.’

‘It might be interesting from the point of view of sources for the hexogen,’ said Calderón, who was not a man to be brushed off easily. ‘We’ve found a van with traces of explosive and Islamic paraphernalia. The Chechens are known to have access to Russian military ordnance and have the sympathy of the Muslim world. In most people’s minds those rebels were responsible for the destruction of the Moscow apartment blocks. If any of these connections have been proven invalid by the intelligence community, then perhaps the Inspector Jefe should know about them now. The source of the explosives will be an important area of his investigation.’

‘His investigation?’ said Juan. ‘Our investigation. This is going to be a concerted effort. The Grupo de Homicidios is not going to crack this case on its own. This hexogen will have been imported. The CNI has the international connections to find out where it came from.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Calderón, embarking on some of his own pomposity, ‘this is where the investigation begins, and if the Inspector Jefe is about to pursue an avenue of enquiry with incorrect or misleading information, then perhaps he should be told.’

Calderón was aware that this was irrelevant in terms of information for the purposes of the investigation, but he also knew that a demonstration of power was required to put Juan in his place. Calderón was the leading Juez de Instrucción and he was not going to have his authority undermined by an outsider, especially a Madrileño.

‘We cannot be certain,’ said Juan, exasperated by the posturing, ‘but a theory is being given credibility that the Russian Security Service, the FSB, were themselves responsible for the outrage, and that they successfully managed to frame the Chechens. Just prior to the explosion Putin had become director of the FSB. The country was in turmoil and there was the perfect opportunity for a power play. The FSB provoked a war in Chechnya and Dagestan. The prime minister lost his job and Putin took over at the beginning of 1999. The Moscow apartment explosions gave him the opportunity to start a patriotic campaign. He was the fearless leader who would stand up to the rebels. By the beginning of 2000, Putin was acting president of Russia. The hexogen used by the FSB was supposed to have come from a scientific research institute in Lubyanka where the FSB has its headquarters. As you can see, Juez Calderón, my explanation does not help us very much here, but it does illustrate how very quickly the world can become a dangerous and confusing place.’

Silence, while the Sevillanos considered the reverberations of the explosion in their own city to places like Chechnya and Moscow. Falcón continued his briefing about the Peugeot Partner, the two men seen unloading goods for the mosque, the men believed to have been in the mosque at the time of the explosion, and the latest revelations about the owner of the vehicle and his nephew, Trabelsi Amar, who had borrowed it.

‘Anything else?’ asked Juan, while Elvira’s assistant entered the name of Trabelsi Amar into the terrorist suspects database.

‘Just one thing to clear up before I continue with the investigation,’ said Falcón. ‘Did the CNI or the CGI have the mosque under surveillance?’

‘What makes you think that we might have done?’ asked Juan.

Falcón briefed them on the mysterious, well-dressed young men from Informáticalidad, who had frequented the nearby apartment over the past three months.

‘That is not the way we would run a surveillance operation and I’ve never heard of Informáticalidad.’

‘What about the antiterrorism unit, Inspector Jefe Barros?’ asked Elvira.

‘We did not have the mosque under active surveillance,’ said Barros, who seemed to be restraining great anger under preternatural calm. ‘I’ve heard of Informáticalidad. They’re the biggest suppliers of computer software and consumables in Seville. They even supply us.’

‘One final question about the Imam,’ said Falcón. ‘We’re told he arrived here from Tunis in September 2004 and that he is in the lowest risk category for terrorist suspects, but his history required a higher authority for clearance.’

‘His file is incomplete,’ said Juan.

‘What does that mean?’

‘As far as we know, he’s clean,’ said Juan. ‘He has been heard to speak out against the cold-blooded, indiscriminate nature of the Madrid bombings. We understand from his visa application that part of the reason he came to Seville was to attempt a healing of the wounds between the Catholic and Muslim communities. He saw that as his duty. We were only concerned about gaps in his history that we could not fill. These gaps occurred in the 1980s, when a lot of Muslims went to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahedeen against the Russians. Some returned radicalized to their homes in the 1990s and others later became the Taliban. The Imam would have been in his thirties at the time and therefore a prime candidate. In the end, the Americans vouched for him and we allowed him a visa.’

‘So this bomb has killed a potential sympathizer, five men over the age of sixty-five, a man under thirty-five who was in a wheelchair, two Spanish converts and two men in their forties collecting disability benefits, which leaves only two under the age of thirty-five, able-bodied and of North African origin,’ said Elvira. ‘Can the CNI offer a theory as to why this strangely mixed group of people who, we have just been told, were not under active surveillance, should be storing high-quality military explosive and why it should have been detonated?’

Silence. The grinding gears of the machinery outside reached them. The thunder of rubble dropping into empty tippers, the hiss and scream of hydraulics, the low roar of the crane’s unwinding cable, all punctuated by the pneumatic drills’ staccato stabbing, reminded these men of the purpose of their meeting and the disaster that had befallen this city.

‘Trabelsi Amar is not on any terrorist suspect database and he’s an illegal alien,’ said Elvira’s assistant, breaking the silence.

‘Do you believe that explosives could have been stored in the mosque without the knowledge of the Imam?’ asked Calderón.

‘There’s an outside chance that he didn’t recognize what it was,’ said Juan. ‘As you know, hexogen looks like sugar. The trace left on the floor indicates that the packaging wasn’t exactly hermetically sealed. It’s possible that the explosive was in those cardboard boxes, which the Inspector Jefe has told us were seen being unloaded yesterday.’

‘But for the hexogen to actually explode would require a detonator,’ said Falcón. ‘From the way in which they were moving it around it must be a stable product.’

‘It is,’ said Juan.

‘Then that means they must have been working on making bombs and accidentally detonated it,’ said Falcón. ‘I doubt they could be doing that in secret in a mosque of that size, with thirteen other people in it. I haven’t seen the plans, but it can’t be more than ten by twenty metres.’

‘So the Imam is complicit in that scenario,’ said Juan. ‘We’ll have to talk to the Americans about Abdelkrim Benaboura and we’ll find a photo ID and a history for Trabelsi Amar.’

‘If Soumaya is identifying Amar as his nephew, then that doesn’t sound to me like deep terrorist cover. He’s probably got photographs,’ said Falcón. ‘We have to consider the possibility that this van was not being driven by him. It could have been stolen or, for whatever reason, given to another party to transport goods to Seville. Trabelsi Amar’s function could have been simply to provide a van, which would not be reported stolen.’

‘We’ll make sure the CGI in Canillas communicate with the local police in Madrid, who are interviewing Mohammed Soumaya,’ said Juan, which sounded like he was undermining Inspector Jefe Barros, who was still boiling in silence. ‘It’s one of the complications of these terrorist operations that the people we know about are active only in so far as they use up our time and resources. As was the case with March 11th, where none of the operatives were known terrorists or had any links to known radical Islamic organizations. They came out of nowhere to perform their tasks.’

‘But you’re in a better position now than you were then,’ said Elvira.

‘Since 9/11 and the evidence of connections made by Islamic terrorist cell members in Spain…’

‘You mean al-Qaeda members?’ said Elvira.

‘We don’t like to use the name al-Qaeda because it implies an organization with a hierarchy along Western lines. This is not the case,’ said Juan. ‘It’s useful for the media to have this name to hang on Islamic terrorism, but we don’t use it in the service. We have to remind ourselves not to be complacent. As I was saying: since 9/11 and the evidence of connections made by Islamic terrorist cell members in Spain with the perpetrators of the Twin Towers and Washington DC attacks, there has been considerable stepping up of activities.’

‘But, as you say, there seems to be an unending stream of young operatives who you don’t know about and who can be organized at a distance to perform terrorist acts,’ said Calderón. ‘That, surely, is the problem?’

‘As you’ve seen from the investigations into the London bombings, there is extraordinary co-operation between all the secret services,’ said Juan. ‘Our proximity to North Africa makes us vulnerable but gives us opportunities as well. In the two years since the Madrid train bombings we have achieved considerable penetration into Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. We hope to improve our ability to pick up sleeping cells by intercepting the signals that might eventually activate them. We are not perfect, but neither are they. You don’t hear about our successes, and it’s too early to say whether we are dealing here with one of our failures.’

‘You said that “in this scenario the Imam is complicit”,’ said Falcón. ‘Does this mean you are looking at other scenarios?’

‘All we can do is prepare ourselves for eventualities,’ said Juan. ‘In the last two years we have been examining a domestic phenomenon, which first came to light on the internet. I hesitate to call this phenomenon a group, because we have found no evidence of organization, or communication, for that matter. What we have found are newsletter pages on a website called www.vomit.org. This was thought to be an American site because it first appeared in the English language, but the CIA and MI5 have just recently told us they now believe VOMIT stands for Victimas del Odio de Musulmanos, Islamistas y Terroristas.’

‘What’s the content of the newsletter?’

‘It’s an updated list of all terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic extremists since the early 1990s. It gives a short account of the attack, the number of victims, both dead and injured, followed by the number of people directly affected by the death or injury of a person close to them.’

‘Does that mean they are contacting the victims’ families?’ asked Elvira.

‘If they are, the victims seem to be unaware of it,’ said Juan. ‘Victims get approached by the media, the government, the social services, the police…and, as yet, we haven’t found anyone who has been able to tell us that they’ve been contacted by VOMIT.’

‘Did this start in 2004 after the Madrid bombings?’ said Elvira.

‘The British first came across the pages in June 2004. By September 2004 it also included Muslim on Muslim attacks, such as suicide bombings against police recruiting offices in Iraq, and since the beginning of 2005 there has also been a section on Muslim women who have been the victims of honour killings or gang rapes. In these cases, they only report on the type of attack and number of victims.’

‘Presumably the posting of these pages on the web is completely anonymous,’ said Calderón, who didn’t wait for an answer. ‘There must have been a Muslim reaction to this, surely?’

‘The Al Jazeera news channel did a piece on these web pages back in August 2004 and there was a huge internet response in which various Arab-sponsored websites enumerated Arab victims of Israeli, American, European, Russian, Far Eastern and Australian aggression. Some of them were extreme and went back in history to the Crusades, the expulsion of the Moors from Spain and the defeat of the Ottoman empire. None of the websites came up with as powerful a banner as VOMIT, and a lot of them couldn’t resist spouting an agenda, so although they were read avidly in the Arab world, they didn’t penetrate the West at all.’

‘So what makes you think that VOMIT has gone from being a passive, unorganized internet phenomenon into an active, operational entity?’ asked Falcón.

‘We don’t,’ said Juan. ‘We review their web pages daily to see if there’s any incitement to violence, disrespect shown to Islam, or attempts at recruitment to some kind of cause, but there’s nothing except the clocking up of attacks and their victims.’

‘Have you spoken to victims of the Madrid bombings?’ asked Falcón.

‘There is no common theme of vengeance amongst them. The only anger was directed at our own politicians and not against North Africans in general, or Islamic fanatics specifically. Most of the victims recognized that many Muslims had also been killed in the bombings. They saw it as an indiscriminate act of terror, with a political goal.’

‘Did any of them know about VOMIT?’

‘Yes, but none of them said they would seek membership if it existed,’ said Juan. ‘However, we do know that there is anger out there from fanatical right-wing groups with strong racist views and anti-immigration policies. We are keeping an eye on them. The police handle their violent activities at a local level. They are not known to have a national organization or to have planned and carried out attacks of this magnitude.’

‘And religious groups?’

‘Some of these fanatically right-wing groups have religious elements, too. If they advertise themselves in any way, we know about them. What concerns us is that they might be learning from their perceived enemies.’

‘So the other possible scenario—that this was an organized attack against a Muslim community—is based solely on what? That it’s about time there was a reaction against Islamic terrorism?’ asked Calderón.

‘Each terrorist atrocity is unique. The circumstances that prevail at the time make it so,’ said Juan. ‘At the time of the March 11th attack, Aznar’s government were expecting an ETA attempt to disrupt the forthcoming elections. A couple of months earlier on Christmas Eve 2003 two bombs of 25 kilos each had been discovered on the Irún-Madrid intercity train. Both bombs were classic ETA devices and had been set to explode two minutes before their arrival in the Chamartín station. Another ETA bomb was found on the track of the Zaragoza-Caspe-Barcelona line, which was set to explode on New Year’s Eve 2003. On 29th February 2004, as everybody in this room knows, the Guardia Civil intercepted two ETA operatives in a transit van which contained 536 kilos of Titadine, destination Madrid. Everything was pointing to a major attack on the railway system prior to the elections on 14th March 2004, which would be planned and carried out by ETA.’

‘That was the information, and the extrapolation from it was sent to the government by the CNI,’ said Calderón, keen to stick it in.

‘And it was wrong, Juez Calderón. We were wrong,’ said Juan. ‘Even after listening to the tapes of the Koran found in the Renault Kangoo van near the Alcalá de Henares station, and the discovery of the detonators not previously used by ETA, and the fact that the explosive was not Titadine, as customarily used by ETA, but Goma 2 ECO, we still couldn’t believe that ETA was not behind it. That is the very point I am making, and it is why we should consider all scenarios in this present attack and not allow our minds to harden around a core of received opinion. We must work, step by step, until we have the unbreakable line of logic that leads to the perpetrators.’

‘We can’t leave people in the dark while we do this,’ said Calderón. ‘The media, the politicians and the public need to know that something is happening, that their safety is assured. Terror breeds confusion—’

‘Comisario Elvira, as leader of this investigation, has that responsibility, as do the politicians. Our job is to make sure that they have the right information,’ said Juan. ‘We’ve already started looking at this attack with a historical mind—the apartment bombs in Moscow, the discovery of Islamic paraphernalia in a white van—and we can’t afford to do that.’

‘The media already knows what was found in the Peugeot Partner van,’ said Calderón. ‘We cannot prevent them from drawing their conclusions.’

‘How do they know that?’ asked Juan. ‘There was a police cordon.’

‘We don’t know,’ said Calderón, ‘but as soon as the vehicle was removed and the journalists allowed into the car park, Comisario Elvira and I were fielding questions about the hexogen, the two copies of the Koran, a hood, the Islamic sash, and plenty of other stuff that wasn’t even in the van.’

‘There were a lot of people out in that car park,’ said Falcón. ‘My officers, the forensics, the bomb squad, the vehicle removal men, were all in the vicinity of that first inspection of the van. Journalists do their job. The cameras were supposed to be kept away from the bodies of the children in the pre-school, but one guy found his way in there.’

‘As we’ve seen before,’ said Juan, breathing down his irritation, ‘it’s very difficult to dislodge first impressions from the public’s mind. There are still millions of Americans who believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible in some way for 9/11. Most of Seville will now believe that they have been the victim of an Islamic terrorist attack and we might not be able to come close to confirming the truth of the matter until we can get into the mosque, which could be days of demolition work away.’

‘Perhaps we should look at the unique circumstances which led to this event,’ said Falcón, ‘and also look at the future, to see if there’s anything that this bombing might be seeking to influence. From my own point of view, the reason I was very early on to the scene here was that I was at the Forensic Institute, discussing the autopsy of a body found on the main rubbish dump on the outskirts of Seville.’

Falcón gave the details of the unidentifiable corpse found yesterday.

‘This could, of course, be an unconnected murder,’ said Falcón. ‘However, it is unique in the crime history of Seville and it does not appear to be the work of a single person, but rather a group of killers, who have gone to extreme lengths to prevent identification.’

‘Have there been any other murders with similar attempts to prevent identification?’ asked Juan.

‘Not in Spain this year, according to the police computer,’ said Falcón. ‘We haven’t checked with Interpol yet. Our investigation is still very new.’

‘Are there any elections due?’

‘The Andalucían parliamentary elections last took place in March 2004,’ said Calderón. ‘The Town Hall elections were in 2003 so they are due next March. The socialists are currently in office.’

Juan took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket.

‘Before we left Madrid we had a call from the CGI, who had just been informed by the editor of the ABC that they had received a letter with a Seville stamp on the envelope. The letter consisted of a single sheet of paper and a printed text in Spanish. We have since discovered that this text comes from the work of Abdullah Azzam, a preacher best known as the leading ideologue of the Afghan resistance to the Russian invasion. It reads as follows:

‘“This duty will not end with victory in Afghanistan; jihad will remain an individual obligation until all other lands that were Muslim are returned to us, so that Islam will reign again: before us lie Palestine, Bokhara, Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, Southern Yemen, Tashkent…”’ he paused, looking around the room, ‘“and Andalucía.”’

10

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 13.45 hrs

The meeting broke up with the news that another body had been found in the rubble. Calderón left immediately. The three CNI men spoke intently amongst themselves, while Falcón and Elvira discussed resources. Inspector Jefe Barros of the CGI stared into the floor, his jaw muscles working over some new humiliation. After ten minutes the CNI conferred with Elvira. Falcón and Barros were asked to leave the room. Barros paced the corridor, avoiding Falcón. Some moments later Elvira called Falcón back in and the CNI men moved towards the door, saying that they would conduct a detailed search of Imam Abdelkrim Benaboura’s apartment.

‘Is that information going to be shared?’ asked Falcón.

‘Of course,’ said Juan, ‘unless it compromises national security.’

‘I’d like one of my officers to be present.’

‘In the light of what’s just been said, we have to do it now and you’re all too busy.’

They left. Falcón turned to Elvira, hands open, questioning this state of affairs.

‘They’re determined not to make a mistake this time round,’ said Elvira, ‘and they want all the credit for it, too. Futures are at stake here.’

‘And to what extent do you have control over what they do?’

‘Those words “national security” are the problem,’ said Elvira. ‘For instance, they want to talk to you on a matter of “national security”, which means I’m told nothing other than it has to be private and at length.’

‘That’s not going to be easy today.’

‘They’ll make time for you—at night, whenever.’

‘And “national security” is the only clue they’ve given?’

‘They’re interested in your Moroccan connections,’ said Elvira, ‘and have asked to interview you.’

‘Interview me?’ said Falcón. ‘That sounds like it’s for a job and I’ve already got one of those with plenty of work in it.’

‘Where are you going now?’

‘I’m tempted to be present at the search of the Imam’s apartment,’ said Falcón. ‘But I think I’m going to follow up the Informáticalidad lead. That’s a very strange way to use an apartment for three months.’

‘So you’re keeping an open mind on this, unlike our CNI friends,’ said Elvira, nodding at the door.

‘I thought Juan was very eloquent on the subject.’

‘That’s how they want everybody else to think, so that they’ve got all their bases covered,’ said Elvira, ‘but there’s no doubt in my mind that they believe they’ve hit on the beginning of a major Islamic terrorist campaign.’

‘To bring Andalucía back into the Islamic fold?’

‘Why else would they want to talk to you about your “Moroccan connections”?’

‘We don’t know what they know.’

‘I know that they’re seeking redress and greater glory,’ said Elvira, ‘and that worries me.’

‘And what was going on with Inspector Jefe Barros?’ asked Falcón. ‘He was present but nothing more, as if he’d been told he was allowed to attend but not to say a word.’

‘There’s a problem, which they will explain to you directly. All I have been told by the head of the CGI in Madrid is that, for the moment, the Seville antiterrorism unit cannot contribute to this investigation.’

Consuelo sat in her office in the restaurant in La Macarena. She had kicked off her shoes and was curled up foetally on her new expensive leather office chair, which rocked her gently backwards and forwards. She had a ball of tissue in her hands, which was crammed into her mouth. She bit against it when the physical pain became too much. Her throat tried to articulate the emotion, but it had no reference points. Her body felt like ruptured earth, spewing up sharp chunks of magma.

The television was on. She had not been able to bear the silence of the restaurant. The chefs weren’t due to start preparing the lunch service until 11 a.m. She had tried to walk her extreme agitation out of herself, but her tour of the spotless kitchen, with its gleaming stainless steel surfaces, its knives and cleavers winking encouragement at her, had terrified rather than calmed. She’d walked the dining rooms and the patio, but none of the smells, the textures, not even the obsessive order of the table settings could fill this aching emptiness pressing against her ribs.

She had retreated to her office, locked herself in. The volume of the television was turned low so that she couldn’t make out the words, but she took comfort from the human murmur. She looked out of the corner of her eye at the images of destruction playing on the screen. There was the sharp smell of vomit in the room as she’d just thrown up at the sight of the tiny bodies under their pinafores outside the pre-school. Tears tracked mascara down her cheeks. The mouth side of the ball of tissue was slimy with sharp saliva. Something had been levered open; the lid was no longer on whatever it was she had inside her, and she, who had always prided herself on her courage to face up to things, could not bear to take a look. She squeezed her eyes shut at a new rising of pain. The chair empathized with the shudder of her body. Her throat squealed as if there was something sharp lodged across it.

The destroyed apartment block flickered on the screen in the corner of her eye. She couldn’t bear to switch off the TV and live with the only other occupant of the silence, even though the building’s collapse was an appalling replication of her own mental state. Only a few hours ago she had been more or less whole. She had always imagined the gap between sanity and madness as a yawning chasm, but now found it was like a border in the desert: you didn’t know whether you’d crossed it or not.

The TV pictures changed from the piles of rubble to a body bag being lifted into a cradle stretcher, to the wounded, staggering down pavements, to the jagged edges of shattered windows, to the trees stripped of all their leaves, to cars upside down in gardens, to a road sign speared into the earth. These TV news editors must be professionals in horror, every image was like a slap to the face, knocking a complacent public into the new reality.

Then calm returned. A presenter stood in front of the church of San Hermenegildo. He had a friendly face. Consuelo turned up the sound in the hope of good news. The camera zoomed in on the plaque and dropped back down to the presenter, who was now walking and giving a brief history of the church. The camera remained tight on the presenter’s face. There was an inexplicable tension in the scene. Something was coming. The suspense transfixed Consuelo. The presenter’s voice told them that this was the site of an old mosque and the camera cut to the apex of a classic Arabic arch. Its focus pulled wide to reveal the new horror. Written in red over the doors were the words: AHORA ES NUESTRA. Now it is ours.

The screen filled again with another montage of horror. Women screaming for no apparent reason. Blood on the pavements, in the gutter, thickening the dust. A body, with the terrible sag of lifelessness, being lifted out of the ruins.

She couldn’t bear the sight of any more. These cameramen must be robots to handle this horror. She turned the TV off and sat in the silence of the office.

The images had jolted her. The lid seemed to have slipped back over the darkness welling inside her chest. Her hands trembled, but she no longer needed to bite on the ball of tissue. The shame of her first consultation with Alicia Aguado came back to her. Consuelo pressed her hands to her cheekbones as she remembered her words: ‘blind bitch’. How could she have said such a thing? She picked up the phone.

Alicia Aguado was relieved to hear Consuelo’s voice. Her concern raised emotion in Consuelo’s throat. Nobody ever cared about her. She stumbled through an apology.

‘I’ve been called worse than that,’ said Aguado. ‘Given that we’re the most inventive insulters in the world, you can imagine the special reserves that are drawn on when it comes to psychologists.’

‘It was unforgivable.’

‘All will be forgiven as long as you come and see me again, Sra Jiménez.’

‘Call me Consuelo. After what we’ve been through, all formality is out of the window,’ she said. ‘When can you see me?’

‘I’d like to see you tonight, but it won’t be possible before 9 p.m.’

‘Tonight?’

‘I’m very concerned about you. I wouldn’t normally ask, but…’

‘But what?’

‘I think you’ve reached a very dangerous point.’

‘Dangerous? Dangerous to whom?’

‘You have to promise me something, Consuelo,’ said Aguado. ‘You have to come directly here to me after work, and when our consultation is over you must go straight home and have somebody—a relative or a friend—to be there with you.’

Silence from Consuelo.

‘I could ask my sister, I suppose,’ she said.

‘It’s very important,’ said Aguado. ‘I think you’ve realized the extreme vulnerability of your state, so I would recommend that you confine yourself to home, work and my consulting room.’

‘Can you just explain that to me?’

‘Not now over the phone, face to face this evening,’ she said. ‘Remember, come straight to me. You must resist all temptations to any diversion, however strong the urge.’

Manuela Falcón sat in Angel’s big comfortable chair in front of the television. She was now incapable of movement, with not even the strength to reach for the remote and shut down the screen, which was transferring the horror images directly to her mind. The police were evacuating El Corte Inglés in the Plaza del Duque after four reports of suspicious packages on different floors of the department store. Two sniffer dogs and their handlers arrived to patrol the building. The image cut to a deserted crossroads in the heart of the city, with shoes scattered over the cobbles and people running towards the Plaza Nueva. Manuela felt pale, with just the minimum quantity of blood circulating around her head and face to maintain basic oxygenation and brain function. Her extremities were freezing, despite the open door to the terrace and the temperature outside steadily rising.

The telephone had rung once since Angel had left for the ABC offices where he hoped to put his finger to the thready pulse of a convulsing city. She’d had the strength then to answer it. Her lawyer had asked whether she’d seen the television and then told her that the Sevillana buyer had pulled out with an excuse about her ‘black’ money not being ready and that she would have to postpone the signing of the deed.

‘That’s not going to stop her from losing her deposit,’ said Manuela, still able to raise some aggression.

‘Have you been listening to what Canal Sur have been reporting?’ said the lawyer. ‘They’ve found a van with traces of a military explosive in the back. The editor of the ABC in Madrid was sent a letter from al-Qaeda saying that they would not rest until Andalucía was back in the Islamic fold. There’s some security expert saying that this is the start of a major terrorist campaign and there’ll be more attacks in the coming days.’

‘Fucking hell,’ said Manuela, jamming a cigarette into her mouth, lighting it.

‘So that 20,000 deposit your buyer might lose is looking like a cheap way out for her.’

‘What about the German’s lawyer, has he called yet?’

‘Not yet, but he’s going to.’

Manuela had clicked off the phone and let it fall in her lap. She smoked on automatic with great fervour, and the nicotine surge enabled her to call Angel, whose mobile was off. They couldn’t find him in the ABC offices, which sounded like the trading floor in the first minutes of a black day for the markets. Her lawyer called again.

‘The German has pulled out. I’ve called the notary’s office and all deed signings have been cancelled for the day. There’s been an announcement on the TV and radio, the Jefe Superior de la Policía and the chief of the emergency services have told us to only use mobile phones if absolutely necessary.’

The workshop was in a courtyard up an old alleyway with massive grey cobbles, off Calle Bustos Tavera. Marisa Moreno had rented it purely because of this alleyway. On bright sunny days, such as this one, the light in the courtyard was so intense that nothing could be discerned from within the darkness of the twenty-five-metre alleyway. The cobbles were like pewter ingots and drew her on. Her attraction to this alleyway was that it coincided with her vision of death. Its arched interior was not pretty, with crappy walls, a collection of fuse boxes and electric cables running over crumbling whitewashed plaster. But that was the point. It was a transference from this messy, material world to the cleansing white light beyond. There was, however, disappointment in the courtyard, to find that paradise was a broken-down collection of shabby workshops and storage houses, with peeling paint, wrought-iron grilles and rusted axles.

It was only a five-minute walk from her apartment on Calle Hiniesta to her workshop, which was another reason she’d rented somewhere too big for her needs. She occupied the first floor, accessed via an iron staircase to the side. It had a huge window overlooking the courtyard, which gave light and great heat in the summer. Marisa liked to sweat; that was the Cuban in her. She often worked in bikini briefs and liked the way the wood chips from her carving stuck to her skin.

That morning she’d left her apartment and taken a coffee in one of the bars on Calle Vergara. The bar was unusually packed, with all heads turned to the television. She ordered her café con leche, drank it and left, refusing all attempts by the locals to involve her in any debate. She had no interest in politics, she didn’t believe in the Catholic Church or any other organized religion, and, as far as she was concerned, terrorism only mattered if you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In the studio she worked on staining two carvings and polishing another two, ready for delivery. By midday she had them rolled in bubblewrap and was down in the courtyard waiting for a taxi.

A young Mexican dealer, who had a gallery in the centre on Calle Zaragoza, had bought the two pieces. He was part Aztec, and Marisa had had an affair with him a few months before she’d met Esteban Calderón. He still bought every carving she made and paid cash on delivery every time. To see them greet each other you might have thought they were still seeing each other, but it was more of a blood understanding, his Aztec and her African.

Esteban Calderón knew nothing of this. He’d never seen her workshop. She didn’t have any of her work in her apartment. He knew she carved wood, but she made it sound as if it was in the past. That was the way she wanted it. She hated listening to Westerners talking about art. They didn’t seem to grasp that appreciation was the other way around: let the piece talk to you.

Marisa dropped off her two finished pieces and took her money. She went to a tobacconist and bought herself a Cuban cigar—a Churchill from the Romeo y Julieta brand. She walked past the Archivo de las Indias and the Alcázar. The tourists were not quite as numerous as usual, but still there, and seemingly oblivious to the bomb which had gone off on the other side of the city, proving her point that terrorism only mattered if it directly affected you.

She walked through the Barrio Santa Cruz and into the Murillo Gardens to indulge in her after-sales ritual. She sat on a park bench, unscrewed the aluminium cap of the cylinder and let the cigar fall into her palm. She smoked it under the palm trees, imagining herself back in Havana.

Inés had pulled herself together after fifteen minutes weeping. Her stomach couldn’t take it any more. The tensing of her abdominals was agony. She had crawled to the shower, pulled off her nightdress and slumped in the tray, keeping her burning scalp out from under the fine needles of water.

After another quarter of an hour she had been able to stand, although not straight because of the pain in her side. She dressed in a dark suit with a high-collared cream blouse and put on heavy make-up. There was no bruising to disguise but she needed a full mask to get through the morning. She found some aspirin, which took the edge off the pain so that she could walk without being creased over to one side. Normally she would walk to work, but that was out of the question this morning and she took a taxi. That was the first she knew of the bomb. The radio was full of it. The driver talked non-stop. She sat in the back, silent behind her dark glasses until the driver, unnerved by her lack of response, asked if she was ill. She told him she had a lot on her mind. That was enough. At least he knew she was hearing him. He went into a long soliloquy about terrorism, how the only cure for this disease was to get rid of the lot of them.

‘Who?’ asked Inés.

‘Muslims, Africans, Arabs…the whole lot. Get shot of them all. Spain should be for the Spanish,’ he said. ‘What we need now are the old Catholic kings. They understood the need to be pure. They knew what they had to do…’

‘So you’re including the Jews in this mass exile?’ she asked.

‘No, no, no que no, the Jews are all right. It’s these Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians. They’re all fanatics. They can’t control their religious fervour. What are they doing, blowing up an apartment block? What does that prove?’

‘It proves how powerful indiscriminate terror can be,’ she said, feeling her whole chest about to burst open. ‘We’re no longer safe in our own homes.’

The Palacio de Justícia was frantic as usual. She slowly went up to her office on the second floor, which she shared with two other fiscales, state prosecutors. She was determined not to show the pain each step unleashed in her side. Having wanted to wear the badge of his violence, she now wanted to disguise her agony.

The mask of her make-up got her through the first excited minutes with her colleagues, who were full of the latest rumour and theory, with hardly a fact between them. Nobody associated Inés with emotional wreckage so they glided over the surface and went back to their work unaware of her state.

There were cases to prepare and meetings to be attended and Inés got through it all until the early afternoon when she found herself with a spare halfhour. She decided to go for a walk in the Murillo Gardens, which were just across the avenue. The gardens would calm her down and she wouldn’t have to listen to any more conjecture about the bomb. She had the little grenade attack in her relationship to consider. She knew a breather in the park wasn’t going to help her sort it out, but at least she might be able to find something around which to start rebuilding her collapsed marriage.

Over the last four years when things had been going wrong for Inés in her marriage she played herself a film loop. It was the edited version of her life with Esteban. It never started with their meeting each other and the subsequent affair, because that would mean the film started with her infidelity, and she did not see herself as somebody who broke her marriage vows. In her movie she was unblemished. She had rewritten her private history and cut out all images that did not meet with her approval. This was not a conscious act. There was no facing up to unfortunate episodes or personal embarrassments, they were simply forgotten.

This movie would have been immensely dull to anyone who was not Inés. It was propaganda. No better than a dictator’s glorious biopic. Inés was the courageous fiancée who had picked up her husband-to-be after the nasty little incident that they never talked about, given him the care and attention he needed to get his career back on track…and so it went on. And it worked. For her. After each of his discovered infidelities she’d played the movie and it had given her strength; or rather it had given her something to record over Esteban’s previous aberration, so that she only suffered from one of his infidelities at a time, and not the whole history.

This time, as she sat on the park bench playing her film, something went wrong. She couldn’t hold the images. It was as if the film was jumping out of the sprockets and letting an alien image flood into her private theatre: someone with long coppery hair, dark skin and splayed legs. This visual interference was shorting out her internal comfort loop. Inés gathered the amnesiac forces of her considerable mind by pressing her hands to the sides of her head and blinkering her eyes. It was then that she realized that it was something on the outside, forcing its way in. Reality was intruding. The copper-haired, dark-skinned whore she’d seen only this morning, naked, on her husband’s digital camera was sitting opposite her, smoking a cigar without a care in the world.

Marisa didn’t like the way the woman sitting on the bench on the other side of the shaded pathway was looking at her. She had the intensity of a lunatic about her; not the raving-in-the-asylum type but a more dangerous version: too thin, too chic, too shallow. She’d come across them at the Mexican dealer’s gallery openings, all on the verge of a nervous breakdown. They filled the air with high-pitched chatter to keep the real world from bursting through the levee, as if, by chanting their consumer mantras, the great nothing that was going on in their lives would be kept at bay. In the gallery she tolerated their presence as they might buy her work, but out in the open she was not going to have one of these cabras ricas

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