The Ignorance of Blood. Robert Thomas Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ Zorrita,’ said Yacoub. ‘I'll let you know where to go afterwards.’

      Falcón ate something unmemorable, drank a beer, sunk a café solo and boarded the train. He wanted to sleep but there was too much brain interference. A woman sitting opposite him was talking to her daughter on her mobile. She was getting remarried and her daughter wasn't happy about it. Complicated lives, getting more complicated by the minute.

      The prison governor called to say that Esteban Calderón had put in a request to see a psychologist.

      The train slashed through the brown, parched plains of northern Andalucía.

      Where had the rain gone?

      ‘He won't see the prison psychologist,’ said the governor. ‘He talks about this woman you know, but he can't remember her name.’

      ‘Alicia Aguado,’ said Falcón.

      ‘You're not the investigating officer in Señor Calderón's case, are you?’

      ‘No, but I'm seeing the officer who is this evening. I'll make sure he contacts you.’

      He hung up. The woman opposite had finished speaking to her daughter. She spun the mobile on the table with a long, painted nail. She looked up. The sort of woman who always knows when she's under observation. Dangerous, save-my-life eyes, thought Falcón. The daughter was right to be concerned.

      Up since before three and still not even lethargic. He closed his eyes to the dangerous ones opposite, but never reached below that confused state on the edge of oblivion. Now that he was worried he might not see her this evening, Consuelo surfaced in his mind. They'd first met five years ago when she'd been the prime suspect in the murder of her husband, the restaurateur Raúl Jiménez. A year later they'd met again and had a fling. Falcón had been hurt when she broke it off, but, as he'd recently discovered, Consuelo had had her own problems, which had sent her to the consulting rooms of the blind clinical psychologist, Alicia Aguado. Now, for the last three months, they'd been trying again. He could tell she was happier. She was easing him into her life gradually: only seeing him at weekends and quite often in family situations, with her sister and the children. He didn't mind that. His work had been punishing. Consuelo, too, was expanding the restaurant business left to her by Raúl Jiménez. Falcón enjoyed the feeling of belonging that he got from sitting at her family table. He wouldn't have minded more sex, but the food was always good, and in their moments alone they were getting on.

      Thoughts of Consuelo always seemed to involve Yacoub. The two were inextricably linked in his mind. The one had led to the other. Falcón and Consuelo had first been drawn together by their fascination with the fate of Raúl Jiménez's youngest son from his first marriage, Arturo, who'd vanished in the mid 1960s never to be seen again. The boy had been kidnapped by a Moroccan businessman as an act of revenge against Raúl Jiménez, who had impregnated the businessman's twelve-year-old daughter and then fled back to Spain. After his brief affair with Consuelo, Falcón had set out to find Arturo, hoping that this would bring her back to him. It hadn't worked, but the reward had been to discover that Arturo had been brought up as one of the Moroccan businessman's sons and had even been given his family name to become Yacoub Diouri.

      Their strange pasts: Falcón, who had been raised in Spain by Francisco Falcón only to find that his real father was a Moroccan artist, and Yacoub, born a Spaniard, forsaken by his father Raúl Jiménez, to be raised by his Moroccan abductor in Rabat, had been the bizarre foundation of their powerful friendship. And for the first time, perhaps as a result of his exhausted state, Falcón found his mildly confused mind reflecting, within the emotional compression of these unusual events, on what had happened to the child of the twelve-year-old daughter who'd been impregnated by Raúl Jiménez. He must ask Yacoub.

      His mobile vibrating against his chest brought him back with a start to the dusty fields flashing past. It was his police mobile and he took the call without checking the name on the screen.

      ‘Listen, Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón. Keep your nose out of things that don't concern you.’

      ‘Who is this?’

      ‘You heard.’

      The line went dead. He checked the number. Withheld. He folded the phone away. The woman opposite was looking at him again. Across the aisle they were watching him, too. Paranoia, that horribly infectious disease, closed in. The voice on the mobile. Had there been an accent? How had they got his police number? Something a little more uncomfortable than satisfaction eased between his shoulder blades as he realized that, in putting pressure on Marisa Moreno, he must be on the right track. He'd been dredging his mind for something to talk about to Inspector Jefe Zorrita. He didn't want to annoy him with a bunch of hairline cracks in his cast-iron case. Now things were firming up in his mind.

      The train eased into the Atocha station. Falcón hadn't arrived in Madrid on the AVE for some years and as he came into the main concourse he was distracted by the continuing memorial to the victims of the 11 March 2004 bombings. He was standing there, looking at the flowers and candles, when the woman from the train appeared by his side. This was too much, he thought.

      ‘Forgive me, now I know it must be you,’ she said. ‘You are Javier Falcón, aren't you? May I shake your hand and tell you how much I admire you for what you said on the television, about catching the perpetrators of the Seville bomb. Now I've seen you in the flesh, I know you won't let us down.’

      He held out his hand, almost in a trance, thanked her. She smiled and brushed past him and in that moment he found that his other hand now contained a piece of folded paper. He wasn't sure who'd put it there, but he was sensible enough not to look at it. He left the station, picked up a cab to the Jefatura. The folded note gave an address just off the Plaza de la Paja in the Latina district and instructions to enter via the garage.

      Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita welcomed him into his office. He was wearing a dark blue suit, a red tie and a white shirt in a way that hinted that minus the tie was about as informal as he ever got. He had his black hair combed back in rails to reveal a forehead with three lines drawn to a focal point above the bridge of his nose. It struck Falcón that there was no mistaking him for anything other than a cop. His hardness had been added in layers; the lacquer of experience. A meeting of the eyes, a handshake, dispelled any possibility that this person was a civil servant or businessman. He had seen it all, heard it all, and his whole family structure and belief system had kept him powerfully sane.

      ‘You look tired, Javier,’ he said, falling back into his chair. ‘It never stops, does it?’

      They looked out of the window at the bright, sunlit world that kept them so fully employed. Falcón's eyes shifted back to the desk where there was a photo of Zorrita with his wife and three children.

      ‘I didn't want to do this over the phone,’ said Falcón. ‘I have enormous respect for the work you did last June under very difficult circumstances…’

      ‘What have you found?’ asked Zorrita, cutting through the preliminaries, interested to hear what he could possibly have missed.

      ‘As yet … nothing.’

      Zorrita sat back, hands clasped over his flat, hard stomach. Not so concerned now that he knew he wasn't going to have to confront a failing on his part.

      ‘My interest in this case is not to get a wife-beater and suspected murderer off the hook,’ said Falcón.

      ‘That man is a cabrón,’ said Zorrita with profound distaste from behind his family photograph. ‘A nasty, arrogant… СКАЧАТЬ