The Blind Man of Seville. Robert Thomas Wilson

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      ‘Have you told the children yet?’ he asked.

      ‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to tell them and then leave them to go to the hospital.’

      ‘They must know something is wrong.’

      ‘They see I’m nervous. They don’t know why they are with their aunt. They keep asking me why we aren’t in the house in Heliopolis and when is Daddy going to bring the present he promised.’

      ‘The dog?’

      ‘You can be quite impressive, Inspector Jefe,’ she said. ‘You don’t have children, do you?’

      ‘No … ‘ he said, wanting to fill that out somehow.

      They continued in silence, heading north towards La Macarena.

      ‘How is the investigation going?’ she asked, polite, distant.

      ‘It’s early days.’

      ‘So you only have the obvious motive to go on.’

      ‘Which is?’

      ‘Wife wants to get rid of unloving older husband, inherit his fortune and disappear with younger lover.’

      ‘People have killed for less.’

      ‘I gave you that motive. There’s no one who could have told you that Raúl Jiménez didn’t love me.’

      ‘What about Basilio Lucena?’

      ‘He only knows that Raúl was impotent and that I have physical needs.’

      ‘Do you know where he was last night?’

      ‘Ah, yes, of course. It would be the lover who would do the deed,’ she said. ‘You’ll meet Basilio and then you must tell me what you think he’s capable of.’

      They passed the Basilica de La Macarena and a few minutes later pulled up by an austere grey building on Avenida Sánchez Pizjuan that housed the Instituto Anatómico Forense. A crowd of people were gathered outside the doors. Falcón parked up inside the hospital barrier. Consuelo Jiménez put on a pair of sunglasses. The crowd were on them as soon as they got out of the car, Dictaphones pointing. Loose words blasted out from the cacophony and cut like shrapnel — ‘marido’, ‘asesinado’, ‘brutalmente’. Falcón took her by the arm and pushed past them, got her through the door and slammed it behind him.

      He walked her through the corridors to the office of the Médico Forense, who took them to the viewing room. The official pulled back the curtain and, beyond the glass panel, lit from above, lay Raúl Jiménez under a sheet that was pulled down over his chest. Two candles burned by his head. His eyes, clean of blood, stared up at the ceiling. There was nothing in them. The back of his head, previously matted with gore, had been washed clean. The nose had been miraculously reattached and the scarring from the flex on his cheeks had gone. The old wound to his right pectoral, seen in the photograph, now looked like the worst thing his body had suffered. Consuelo Jiménez formally identified the body. The curtain was closed. Falcón asked her to wait while he had a short discussion with the Médico Forense, who told him that Raúl Jiménez had died at three in the morning. He had suffered a brain haemorrhage and heart failure. There was an extremely high level of Viagra in his blood. It was the doctor’s conclusion that the increased blood pressure and high degree of distress combined with the clogged condition of the victim’s arteries had caused Raúl Jiménez to more or less internally burst. He gave Falcón his official typed report.

      They ran the gauntlet to the car and rather than go back through the barrier, which was blocked by the journalists, he headed through the grounds of the faculty and out past the main hospital building on to Calle de San Juan de Ribera.

      ‘They should have closed his eyes,’ said Consuelo Jiménez. ‘You cannot be at peace with your eyes still open, even if they don’t see anything.’

      ‘They couldn’t close his eyes,’ he said as the traffic lights released them to turn left on to Calle Muñoz León.

      He drove past the old city walls and found a parking space in the busy street. Sra Jiménez clung to the roof grip, her knuckles whitening, her face already beginning to shrink from the words that she knew were coming her way. The worst of his career.

      He told her how it was, with no soft focus, giving his own appalled version. Yes, it had been the worst of his career. There were scenes he’d had to ‘process’ which perhaps sounded worse — walking into an apartment in a high-rise block in an urbanización on the outskirts of Madrid, four dead in the sitting room, blood up the walls, two dead in the kitchen, needles, syringes, tinfoil floating on gore and, in the bedroom, a child whimpering on a soiled cot. But that was all expected horror in a culture of brutality. The torture of Raúl Jiménez was something he could not be objective about and not just because he was sensitive about eyes, which were so important to his work. It was how the killer’s punishment of his victim had worked on his own imagination. It terrified him, the notion of the sheer relentlessness of reality, the lack of visual respite. As Sra Jiménez had noted, not even in death could he be seen to enjoy the big sleep but had to lie in eternal, wide-eyed horror at man’s capacity for evil.

      Sra Jiménez had started crying. Really crying. This was no dabbing at the mascara but a bawling, retching, snot-streaked breakdown. Javier Falcón understood the cruelty of police work. He was not the man to comfort this woman. It was he who had put the images in her head. His job, the point of his job at this moment, was to observe not just the veracity of the emotional display but also to perceive the opening, the crack in the carapace where he would jam in his lever. It had been his conscious tactic to get her in a car, in an enclosed bubble in a busy street with nowhere to go, while an indifferent world crashed by, oblivious to the enormity.

      ‘You were in the Hotel Colón last night?’ he said and she nodded. ‘Were you alone after your children had gone to bed?’

      She shook her head.

      ‘Was Basilio Lucena with you last night?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘All night?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘What time did he leave?’

      ‘We had dinner in the room. We went to bed. He must have left by two o’clock.’

      ‘Where did he go?’

      ‘Home, I suppose.’

      ‘He didn’t go to the Edificio Presidente?’

      Silence. No answer, while Falcón looked into the structure of her face.

      ‘What does Basilio Lucena do for a living?’ he asked.

      ‘Something useless at the university. He’s a lecturer.’

      ‘What department?’

      ‘One of the sciences. Biology or chemistry — I can’t remember. We never talked about it. It doesn’t interest him. It’s a position and a salary, that’s all.’

      ‘Did СКАЧАТЬ