The Blind Man of Seville. Robert Thomas Wilson
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу The Blind Man of Seville - Robert Thomas Wilson страница 24
Название: The Blind Man of Seville
Автор: Robert Thomas Wilson
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Ужасы и Мистика
isbn: 9780007378296
isbn:
‘Now I’m glad it was you who talked to them,’ said Falcón. ‘What did I just say about the basics?’
‘You still won’t get me to work through that address book,’ said Ramírez.
‘So these boys saw Raúl Jiménez talking to somebody?’
‘Have you heard of a restaurant chain called Cinco Bellotas run by a guy called Joaquín López? He’s young, dynamic and he’s got good backing. He’s one of the few people in Seville who could buy and run Raúl Jiménez’s restaurants tomorrow.’
‘Any connection between him and Sra Jiménez?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s a very elaborate plan. Elaborate and gruesome,’ said Falcón, continuing up the stairs, toeing the outer door to his office. ‘Ask yourself this question, Inspector: Who could she possibly have found, and what kind of payment would it have taken, to persuade someone to do all that preliminary filming, get into an apartment like that and torture an old man to death?’
‘Depends how badly she wants it,’ said Ramírez. ‘There’s no innocence there, if you ask me.’
The two men looked out of the window of Falcón’s office at the diminishing ranks of cars in the darkening evening.
‘And, look, the other thing,’ said Falcón, ‘whatever the killer showed Raúl Jiménez was for real. He didn’t want to see it, which was why the killer had to cut …’
Ramírez nodded, sighed, his brainwork done for the day. He lit a cigarette without thinking or remembering that Falcón detested smoking in his office.
‘So what is your angle, Inspector Jefe?’
Falcón found that his focus had shortened. He was no longer staring out over the emptying car park but was looking at his own reflection in the glass. He seemed hollow-eyed, vacant, unseeing, even sinister.
The killer was forcing him to see,’ he said.
‘But what?’
‘We’ve all got something that we’re ashamed of, something that when we think of it we shudder with embarrassment or something worse than embarrassment.’
Ramírez stiffened beside him, the man solidifying, his carapace suddenly there, impenetrable. Nobody tinkered inside Ramírez’s works. Falcón checked him in the glass, decided to make it easier for the Sevillano.
‘You know, like when you were a kid, making a fool of yourself with a girl, or perhaps being cowardly, failing to protect somebody who was your friend, or a moral weakness — not standing up for something you believed in because you could get beaten up. These sorts of things, but transferred to an adult life with adult implications.’
Ramírez looked down at his tie, which was about as introspective as he’d ever been.
‘Do you mean the sort of things that Comisario Lobo warned you about?’
This struck Falcón as brilliantly deflective. Corruption — the manageable stain. Machine wash, rinse and spin. Forgotten. It’s only money. All part of the game.
‘No,’ he said.
Ramírez drifted towards the door, announced that he was packing it in for the day. Falcón dismissed him via the glass.
He was suddenly exhausted. The massive day settled on his shoulders. He closed his eyes and instead of the thought of dinner, a glass of wine and sleep, he found his mind still turning, spiralling around the question:
What could be so terrible?
Thursday, 12th April 2001, Javier Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville
Javier Falcón sat in the study of the large eighteenth-century house that had belonged to his father. The room was on the ground floor and looked out through an arched colonnade on to a central patio, in the middle of which was a fountain of a bronze boy up on one toe with one leg trailing and an urn over his shoulder. When the fountain spouted, water came out of the urn. Falcón only ran it in summer when the trickle of water could delude him into thinking he was cool.
He was alone in the house. The housekeeper, Encarnación, who had been his father’s housekeeper, left at 7 p.m. which meant that he never saw her. The only evidence of her presence was the occasional note and her habit, annoying to him, of moving things around. The plant pots on the patio would suddenly be arranged in a different corner, small pieces of furniture would be removed to reappear in different rooms, effigies of the Virgen del Rocío would occupy previously vacant niches. His wife, his ex-wife, had been a great promoter of change, too.
‘We could make this room your snooker room,’ she’d said. ‘We could put a humidor there for your cigars.’
‘But I don’t smoke.’
‘I think it would be nice.’
‘And I don’t play snooker.’
‘You should try.’
These stupid conversations drifted back to him as he sat at his desk with his magnifying glass. Not the ridiculous antique Sherlock Holmes affair his wife had bought him for a birthday, which was too absurd for the Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homicidios. This was a magnifying glass mounted on a perspex box that also shed light on to whatever he was observing.
He was going through the photographs he’d taken from Raúl Jiménez’s desk. In front of him, leaning against a framed photograph of his mother holding him as a baby, flanked by his then seven-year-old brother Paco and five-year-old sister Manuela, were two other photographs side by side. The first was another shot of his mother, who was sitting on the beach with the wind in her hair, wearing a swimsuit and holding a bathing cap covered with rubber white-petalled flowers. It was her favourite informal photograph. On the back was written Tangier, June 1952. She had been twenty-five years old and it was impossible to believe, looking at her there, full of vitality, that she only had nine more years to live.
The second photograph was of his father — black hair swept back, a small pencil moustache, his nose too big for his young face, the mouth of a sensualist and the eyes. Even in black and white, the eyes were extraordinary. They looked as if they were used to seeing clearly over great distances and any received light would glow in the irises, which were green but turned to amber close to the pupil. In his eighties, after the first heart attack had weakened him, those green eyes still managed to hold the light in them. They were the eyes you’d expect an artist of his stature to have — observant, piercing and numinous. In the shot his father was wearing a white dinner jacket and a black bow tie. On the back was written New Year’s Eve, Tangier, 1953.
Falcón worked his way through the Jiménez photographs, furious at the poor quality of the prints. He wondered why the hell he was doing this. He had a habit of working tangentially, but this СКАЧАТЬ