The Silent and the Damned. Robert Thomas Wilson

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       2

       Wednesday, 24th July 2002

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

      ‘Nothing at all,’ said Vázquez.

      ‘Does the handwriting look normal to you?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

      ‘Interesting,’ said Calderón.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      ‘That’s not the point –’ said Falcón.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      ‘Does that mean he used to be a СКАЧАТЬ