The Blind Man of Seville. Robert Thomas Wilson

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      Falcón gave him the names and addresses of the fired employees and told him to have them interviewed as soon as possible. Ramírez left. Falcón picked up the photograph of Raúl Jiménez’s first wife — Gumersinda Bautista. He called the Jefatura and asked them to run a check on José Manuel Jiménez Bautista, born in Tangier in the late 1940s, early 1950s.

      He sat back with the other photographs, flicked through the nameless people. He came across a shot of Raúl Jiménez on the deck of a yacht. He was barely recognizable. No hint of the toadiness to come. He was handsome and confident and stood as if he knew it, hands on hips, shoulders braced, chest puffed out. Falcón brushed his thumb over that chest, thinking there was a speck on the photograph. It stayed and on closer inspection looked to be some kind of wound to his right pectoral near the armpit. He flipped it over — Tangier, July 1953 was written on the back.

      His mobile rang. The police computer had come up with a Madrid address and telephone number for José Manuel Jiménez. He took them down and asked after Serrano and Baena, two other officers from his group. They were off for Semana Santa. He ordered them to be sent down to him at the Jiménez apartment.

      Instead of reviewing his notes and planning his next assault on the cultivated defences of Doña Consuelo Jiménez, who, he couldn’t deny it, was still his prime suspect, he found himself reaching for the sheaf of old photographs. There were some group shots, again from Tangier, in 1954 according to the dates on the back. He looked over the faces, thinking that he was trying to find his father in there until he realized that he was concentrating more on the women and was wondering if his mother, who’d died seven years after these photographs were taken, was amongst these strangers. He was fascinated at the prospect of finding a shot of her he’d never seen, in the company of people he’d never heard of, in a time before he was born. Some of the faces were too small and grainy and he decided to take them home and look at them under his magnifying glass.

      He took a cigarette from the pack of Celtas, sniffed it. He hadn’t smoked for fifteen years. He’d given up when he was thirty, on the same day he’d terminated his relationship of five years with Isabel Alamo. She’d been heartbroken, not least because she’d assumed their private talk was going to be a marriage proposal. In the ghastliness of that memory he broke off the filter, picked up the Bic and lit the cigarette. It was horrible even without inhaling and he set it down on the ashtray. He leaned back in the chair as his mind shot back to another memory back in Tangier on New Year’s Eve 1963. He was standing by the stairs in his pyjamas, waist height to all the leaving guests, who were going down to the port for the firework display. Mercedes, his second mother, his father’s second wife, picked him up and took him back upstairs to bed. This smell was in her hair, Celtas; somebody must have been smoking the same brand at the party. There were still plenty Of Spaniards in Tangier in those days, even though the really good times were long over. Mercedes had put him to bed, kissed him hard, squeezed him to her bosom. He left the memory at that point. He never took it forward from there because … he just didn’t. He was interested to find that this new smell could take him back to that time. Normally he only ever thought of Mercedes when he came across Chanel No.5, her perfume of choice.

      A knock at the door brought him back. Serrano and Baena stood in the corridor.

      ‘You were quick,’ said Falcón.

      The two men shuffled in, uneasy with their boss who they assumed was being sarcastic. They’d been forty minutes.

      ‘Traffic,’ said Baena, which solved the problem both ways.

      Falcón was mystified by the sight of the cigarette reduced to an ash snake in front of him. A glance at his watch left him stunned to find that it was past eleven o’clock and he’d achieved nothing. He checked his notes to see when Ramírez had timed the removals men’s lunch break and ordered Serrano and Baena to go out on the streets to try to find a witness who’d seen someone, probably in overalls, climbing up the lifting gear to the sixth floor of the Edificio Presidente.

      Sub-Inspector Pérez called saying the maid, Dolores Oliva, had finally come round. She wouldn’t speak until she had a rosary in her hand and throughout the interview she fingered a key ring of the Virgen del Rocío. She was convinced she had come into contact with pure evil and that it might have found a way in. Falcón tapped the desk. It was always like this with Pérez. The academy and eleven years in the field had not been able to break down his need to tell a story in a report. It took eight minutes for him to reveal that Dolores Oliva had opened the door with five turns of the key.

      Falcón cut Pérez off and told him to get down to Los Remedios as soon as possible to work the apartments in the block with the print-outs of the unidentified persons from the CCTV tapes. The prostitute had to be identified and found, too. He hung up and saw that there was a message for him from the Médico Forense saying that the autopsy was complete and a written report was being typed out. He thought for a moment about whether he should let Consuelo Jiménez see the body in its full horror and decided that it would be better to keep the eyelid removal as police information only. He called the Médico Forense back and asked him to make the body clean and presentable.

      He arranged to pick up Consuelo Jiménez from her sister’s house in San Bernardo and went down to his car calling Fernández and telling him to make contact with Pérez to work the apartments.

      It was fiercely bright outside after the darkness of the apartment and nearly warm. It was always the same around Semana Santa and the Feria, a most ambiguous time of year. Neither hot nor cold. Neither dry nor wet. Neither religious nor secular. He got into his car and threw the sheaf of old photographs on the seat. The one of Gumersinda, Raúl’s first wife, was on top. It was a formal shot and she was staring earnestly into the camera, but it was Consuelo Jiménez’s words that came to mind: ‘He totally failed to love me.’ Two bizarre thoughts clashed in his mind, squirting adrenalin into his system, which made him start the car and pull out without looking. Tyres squealed. A muffled shout of ‘Cabrón!‘ reached him.

      He made a U-turn and crossed the river over the Puente del Generalísimo. The port railway tracks streamed beneath him and the cranes formed a guard of honour down to the massive Puente del V Centenario, which rose out of the urban mist. His thoughts burgeoned as he headed northeast past the Parque de María Luisa and he desperately wanted that cigarette he’d let burn to ash in Raúl Jiménez’s study. What had come into his mind were the words of his wife, Inés, whom he, too, had failed to love: ‘You have no heart, Javier Falcón,’ and this had been entangled with the sight of Gumersinda, a woman from his mother’s era, which had made him think of his blood mother, Pilar, and then his stepmother, Mercedes. All these women, immensely important to him, he now thought he’d somehow failed.

      The idea was so new and peculiar it made him quite desperate to be active and unconscious.

      He sat at the traffic lights, his fingers jittering over the steering wheel, muttering: ‘This is madness’ because this did not happen to him. He did not have random inexplicable thoughts. He had never been by nature a day-dreamer. He had always been calm and methodical, which characteristics could not be applied to him now. From the moment he’d seen Raúl’s terrible face there’d been something no less cataclysmic than a genetic mutation. His mind was flooding with uncomfortable memories, sweat welled up from his forehead and dampened his hands, his concentration was shot. He hadn’t even got this investigation under control. He hadn’t checked the windows and doors out on to the balcony in the Jiménez apartment. First steps. And that business with the TV, yanking the cord out of the wall and not mentioning it. It was unprofessional. It was not him.

      He cruised up Calle Balbino Murrón right to the end, to a building that overlooked the soccer pitch in the Colegio de los Jesuitas. He put the photos in the glove compartment. Consuelo Jiménez came out on her own before he reached the house. A child, probably СКАЧАТЬ