The Ignorance of Blood. Robert Thomas Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ Sol and studio, and interviewed everybody he'd ever known and likewise found nothing.

       5) They had tried to gain access to the I4IT (Europe) building in Madrid. This company was the European arm of an American-based investment group run by two born-again Christians from Cleveland, Ohio. They were the ultimate owners of Horizonte and, through a team of highly paid lawyers, had successfully blocked all investigations, arguing that the police had no right to enter their offices.

      Every time Falcón threw himself into his chair he faced that chart and the hard brick wall behind it.

      The world had moved on, as it always did, even after New York, Madrid and London, but Falcón had to mark time, wandering aimlessly in the maze of passages that the conspiracy had become. As always, he was haunted by the promise he'd made to the people of Seville in a live broadcast on 10th June: that he would find the perpetrators of the Seville bombing, even if it took him the rest of his career. That was what he faced, although he would never admit it to Comisario Elvira, when he woke up alone in the dark. He had penetrated the conspiracy, gained access to the dark castle, but it had rewarded him with nothing. Now he was reduced to hoping for ‘the secret door’ or ‘the hidden passage’ which would take him to what he could not see.

      What he had noticed was that the one person, over these three long months, who was never far from his thoughts was the disgraced judge, Esteban Calderón, and, by association, the judge's girlfriend, a Cuban wood sculptor called Marisa Moreno.

      ‘Inspector Jefe?’

      Falcón looked up from the dark pit of his mind to find the wide-open face of one of his best young detectives, the ex-nun, Cristina Ferrera. There was nothing very particular about Cristina that made her attractive – the small nose, the big smile, the short, straight, dull blonde hair didn't do it. But what she had on the inside – a big heart, unshakeable moral beliefs and an extraordinary empathy – had a way of appearing on the outside. And it was that which Falcón had found so appealing during their first interview for the job she now held.

      ‘I thought you were in here,’ she said, ‘but you didn't answer. Up early?’

      ‘A colourful Russian got killed by a flying steel rod on the motorway,’ said Falcón. ‘Have you got anything for me?’

      ‘Two weeks ago you asked me to look into the life of Juez Calderón's girlfriend, Marisa Moreno, to see if there was any dirt attached,’ said Ferrera.

      ‘And here I am, by remarkable coincidence, thinking about that very person,’ said Falcón. ‘Go on.’

      ‘Don't get too excited.’

      ‘I can tell from your face,’ said Falcón, drifting back to the wall chart, ‘that whatever it is, it's not much to show for two weeks' work.’

      ‘Not solid work, and you know what it's like here in Seville: things take time,’ said Ferrera. ‘You already know she has no criminal record.’

      ‘So what did you find?’ asked Falcón, catching a different tone in her voice.

      ‘After getting people to do a lot of rooting around in the local police archives, I've come up with a reference.’

      ‘A reference?’

      ‘She reported a missing person. Her sister, Margarita, back in May 1998.’

      ‘Eight years ago?’ said Falcón, looking up at the ceiling. ‘Is that interesting?’

      ‘That's the only thing I could find,’ said Ferrera, shrugging. ‘Margarita was seventeen and had already left school. The local police did nothing except check up on her about a month later and Marisa reported that she'd been found. Apparently, the girl had left home with a boyfriend that Marisa didn't know about. They'd gone to Madrid until their money ran out and then hitched back. That's it. End of story.’

      ‘Well, if nothing else, it gives me an excuse to go and see Marisa Moreno,’ said Falcón. ‘Is that all?’

      ‘Did you see this message from the prison governor? Your meeting with Esteban Calderón is confirmed for one o'clock this afternoon.’

      ‘Perfect.’

      Ferrera left and Falcón was once again alone in his head with Marisa Moreno and Esteban Calderón. There was an obvious reason why Calderón was never far from his thoughts: the brilliant but arrogant instructing judge of the 6th June bombing had been found, days after the explosion, at an absolutely crucial moment of their investigation, trying to dispose of his prosecutor wife in the Guadalquivir river. Calderón's wife, Inés, was Javier Falcón's ex-wife. As the Homicide chief, Falcón had been called to the scene. When they'd opened the shroud around the body and he'd found himself looking down into Inés's beautiful but inanimate features he'd fainted. Given the circumstances, the investigation into Inés's murder had been handed over to an outsider, Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita from Madrid. In an interview with Marisa Moreno, Zorrita had discovered that, on the night of the murder, Calderón had left her, taken a cab home and let himself into his double-locked apartment. Zorrita had drawn together an extraordinary array of lurid detail involving domestic and sexual abuse, and extracted a confession from a stunned Calderón, who had been subsequently charged. Since then Falcón had spoken to the judge only once, in a police cell, shortly after the event. Now he was nervous, not because he feared a resurgence of the earlier emotions, but because, after all his file reading, he was hoping he'd found the smallest chink into the heart of the conspiracy.

      The internal phone rang. Comisario Elvira told Falcón that Vicente Cortés from the Costa del Sol GRECO had arrived. Falcón checked with the forensics, who'd so far only found fingerprints that matched those of Vasili Lukyanov. They were about to start work on the money, but they needed Falcón for the key. He went down to the evidence room.

      ‘When you're done, tell me and I'll put the money in the safe until we can get it transferred to the bank,’ said Falcón. ‘What about the briefcase?’

      ‘The most interesting things in there were twenty-odd disks,’ said Jorge. ‘We played one. It looked like hidden-camera footage of guys having sex with young women, snorting cocaine, some S&M stuff, that kind of thing.’

      ‘You haven't transferred it to a computer, have you?’

      ‘No, just played it on a DVD player.’

      ‘Where are the disks now?’

      ‘On top of the safe there.’

      Falcón locked them inside, took the lift up to Comisario Elvira's office where he was introduced to Vicente Cortés from the Organized Crime Response Squad, and Martín Díaz from the Organized Crime Intelligence Centre, CICO. Both men were young, in their mid-thirties. Cortés was a trained accountant who, from the way his shoulders and biceps strained against the material of his white shirt, looked as if he'd been put through a few assault courses since he'd graduated from number-crunching. He had brown hair swept back, green eyes and a mouth that was permanently on the brink of a sneer. Díaz was a computer specialist and a linguist with Russian and Arabic up his sleeve. He wore a suit which he probably had to have made especially for him, being close to two metres tall. He played basketball to professional standard. He was dark-haired with brown eyes and a slight stoop, probably earned by trying to listen to his wife, half a metre shorter than him. This was the reality of catching organized criminals – accountants and computer whizzes, rather than special forces and weapons-trained cops.

      Falcón СКАЧАТЬ