The Blind Man of Seville. Robert Thomas Wilson

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      ‘The children were both born in Tangier?’

      ‘They must have been.’

      ‘I’ll run it through the computer.’

      ‘Of course you will,’ she said.

      ‘Did he ever talk about his Tangier days … your husband?’

      ‘Now that was a very long time ago. We’re talking about the early forties and fifties. I think he left there shortly after independence in 1956. I don’t think he came straight here but I can’t be sure. All I do know was that by 1967, when his wife killed herself, he was living in a penthouse in one of those blocks of flats on the Plaza de Cuba. They were new then.’

      ‘And near the river.’

      ‘Yes, she must have looked at that river a lot,’ she said. ‘It can be quite mesmerizing, a river at night. Black, slow-moving waters don’t seem so dangerous.’

      ‘What do you know about your husband’s …?’

      ‘Call him Raúl, Inspector Jefe.’

      ‘Raúl’s personal and business relationships between, say, the death of his first wife and your meeting in the Feria in 1989?’

      ‘This is ancient history, Inspector Jefe. Do you think it’s relevant?’

      ‘No, I don’t, just background. I have to learn a life in a morning. I have to establish a victim in his context if I’m to have a chance at discovering motive. Most people are killed by people they know …’

      ‘Or thought they knew.’

      ‘Exactly.’

      ‘The killer knew us, didn’t he? The happy Family Jiménez.’

      ‘He knew about you.’

      Out of nowhere her face crumpled and she started crying, burst into wracking sobs and collapsed forwards on to her knees. Falcón moved towards her, unsure how to act in these situations. She sensed it and held up her hand. He held out a box of tissues, hovering like a bad waiter. She slumped back into her chair, panting, her eyes black and glistening.

      ‘You were asking about his personal and business relationships,’ she said, staring off out of the window.

      ‘He was forty-four when his first wife died. I can’t believe he went twenty years without …”

      ‘Of course there were women,’ she said savagely, angry now, possibly at him for his curiosity and his uselessness. ‘I don’t know how many there were. I imagine lots, but none of them lasted. Quite a few of them came to look at me … the winner of Raúl’s devotion. Most had their nails dipped in spite, ready to scratch. You know how I dealt with them, Inspector Jefe? I gave them the satisfaction of thinking me a silly little tart. You know, a little bit cursi, twee. It made them happy. They were superior. They left me alone after that. Some of them are friends now … in the Seville sense of the word.’

      ‘And business?’

      ‘He didn’t start the restaurants until the tourist boom in the eighties when people found there was more to Spain than the Costa del Sol. It was a hobby to begin with. He was very sociable and he didn’t see why he shouldn’t make money out of it. He started with that one in El Porvenir for his rich friends, then the one in Santa Cruz for the tourists, likewise the big one off the Plaza Alfalfa. After we married he added the two on the coast and last year we opened that one in La Macarena.’

      ‘Where did the money come from in the first place?’

      ‘He made a lot of money in Tangier after the Second World War when it was a free port. There were thousands of companies there in those days. He even had his own bank and a construction company. It was an easy place to get rich then, as I’m sure you know.’

      ‘I was very young. I have no memory of the place,’ said Falcón.

      ‘He started a barging company here in Seville in the sixties. I think he even owned a steel-pressing factory for a while. Then he got into property and went into partnership with the construction company Hermanos Lorenzo, which he pulled out of in 1992.’

      ‘Was that amicable?’

      ‘The Lorenzos are regular clients of the restaurants. We used to take the children to their house in Marbella every summer until Raúl got bored.’

      ‘So since the death of his first wife and his daughter going insane you don’t think there’s been any major disturbance in Raúl’s life?’

      She remained silent for some time, staring out of the window, her foot nodding, the shoe working loose from her heel.

      ‘I’m beginning to think that Raúl was the quintessential Spaniard, maybe the quintessential Sevillano, too. Life is a fiesta!’ she said, and held her hands out in the direction of the Feria ground. ‘He was as you see him there in the photographs. Smiling. Happy. Charming. But it was a cover, Inspector Jefe. It was a cover for his total misery.’

      ‘An antidote, too, maybe,’ he said, not agreeing with her, thinking that he was Spanish, too, and he didn’t consider himself miserable.

      ‘No, not an antidote, because his alegría didn’t counteract anything. It never remedied his essential condition which, believe me, was one of abject misery.’

      ‘And you never got to the root of that?’

      ‘He didn’t want me to and I didn’t want to. He quickly discovered that while I was the visual replacement of his wife I was not her clone. Having pursued me relentlessly, he totally failed to love me. I think, in fact, I made him even more miserable by constantly reminding him of her. Still, he kept his side of the bargain, I’ll say that for him.’

      ‘What was that?’

      ‘He absolutely didn’t want any more children and I very much wanted them. I said I wouldn’t marry him if he wasn’t going to give me children. So we … copulated, I think that’s the right word, on the three occasions necessary. He only just made it for the youngest. Those were pre-Viagra days.’

      ‘And so you found Basilio Lucena.’

      ‘I’m not finished about the children yet,’ she said, snapping. ‘Having said he didn’t want children, he then completely doted on them and was incredibly, obsessively protective of them. He was security mad. He made sure they were picked up from school. They never walked around alone. They never even played unsupervised. And have you seen the front door to this flat? That was put in after the last one was born. There are six steel bolts within the body of the door, which by five turns of the key are driven into the wall. We don’t even have a door like that to the office and there’s a safe in there.’

      ‘Who normally locked the door at night?’

      ‘He did. Unless he was away and then he’d call me at one or two in the morning to make sure I’d done it.’

      ‘Would he have locked it if he was alone?’

      ‘I’m sure he would have. СКАЧАТЬ