The Blind Man of Seville. Robert Thomas Wilson

Чтение книги онлайн.

       10

       Friday, 13th April 2001, the AVE Madrid-Seville

      Even this AVE, the late one, which wouldn’t get into Seville until after midnight, was full. As the train shot through the Castillian night, Falcón brushed the crumbs of a bocadillo de chorizo from his lap and stared out of the window through the transparent reflection of the passenger opposite him. Thoughts trickled through his mind, which was tired but still racing from the intrusions he’d made into the Jiménez family.

      He’d left José Manuel Jiménez at 3 p.m., having asked if he’d mind him visiting Marta at the San Juan de Dios mental institution in Ciempozuelos, forty kilometres south of the city. The lawyer warned him that it wasn’t likely to be a productive meeting but agreed to phone ahead so that he’d be expected. Jiménez had been right, but not for the reasons he’d thought. Marta had had a fall.

      Falcón came across her in the surgery having a couple of stitches put in her eyebrow. She was ashen, which he supposed could have been her normal colouring. Her hair was black and white, wound up and pinned in a bun. Her eyes were set deep in her head and their surrounds were charcoal grey with large purple quarter-circles that reached the top of her cheekbones. It could have been bruising from the fall, but had a more permanent look to it.

      A Moroccan male nurse was sitting with her, holding her hand and murmuring in a mixture of Spanish and Arabic, while a female junior doctor stitched the eyebrow which had bled profusely, spattering the hospital-issue clothing. Throughout the operation she held on to something attached to a gold chain round her neck. Falcón assumed it was a cross, but on the one occasion that she released it he saw there was a gold locket and a small key.

      She was in a wheelchair. He accompanied the nurse as he pushed her back to the ward, which contained five other women. Four were silent while the fifth maintained a constant murmur of what sounded like prayer but was in fact a stream of obscenities. The Moroccan parked Marta and went to the woman, held her hand, rubbed her back. She quietened.

      ‘She always becomes agitated at the sight of blood,’ he explained.

      The Moroccan’s name was Ahmed. He had a degree in psychology from Casablanca University. His good nature and openness iced over visibly when Falcón showed him his police ID.

      ‘But what are you doing here?’ asked Ahmed. ‘These people don’t go out. They’re permanent residents, barely capable of the simplest of things. Beyond the gates is as good as another planet to them.’

      Falcón looked down on Marta’s salt-and-pepper head, the white pad over her eyebrow, and an immense sadness broke inside his chest. Here was the real casualty of the Jiménez story.

      ‘Does she understand anything of what we say?’ he asked.

      ‘It depends,’ he said. ‘If you talked about C-A-T-S, she might react.’

      ‘What about A-R-T-U-R-O?’

      Ahmed’s face settled into a bland wariness, which Falcón had seen before in immigrants under police questioning. The blandness was to minimize any irritation in the officer, the wariness to combat intrusive questioning. It was an attitude that might have worked with Moroccan police, but it annoyed Falcón.

      ‘Her father has been murdered,’ he said quietly.

      Marta coughed once, twice and the third was followed by a stream of vomit, which pooled in her lap and dripped to the floor.

      ‘She’s in shock from her fall,’ said Ahmed, and moved away.

      Falcón sat on the bed, his face level with Marta’s. Vomit clung to some hairs on her chin. She was panting and not looking at him. Her hand still held the locket. Ahmed returned with new clothes and cleaning equipment on a trolley. He screened Marta off. Falcón sat across the room to wait. Under her bed was a small, padlocked metal trunk.

      The screens were pulled back and Marta reappeared in new clothes. Falcón walked with Ahmed as he pushed his trolley.

      ‘Have you ever talked to her about Arturo?’

      ‘It’s not my job. I’m qualified, but only in my own country. Here I am a nurse. Only the doctor talks to her about Arturo.’

      ‘Have you been present?’

      ‘I have not been in attendance, but I have been there.’

      ‘What’s her reaction to the name?’

      Ahmed performed his cleaning tasks on automatic.

      ‘She becomes very upset. She brings her fingers to her mouth and makes a noise, a kind of desperate pleading noise.’

      ‘Does she articulate anything?’

      ‘She is not articulate.’

      ‘But you spend more time with her, maybe you understand her better than the doctor.’

      ‘She says: “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my fault.”’

      ‘Do you know who Arturo is?’

      ‘I haven’t seen her case notes and nobody has seen fit to inform me.’

      ‘Who is her doctor?’

      ‘Dra Azucena Cuevas. She is on holiday until next week.’

      ‘What about the kitten? Wasn’t it you who brought in the kitten and she started …?’

      ‘There are no cats allowed on the ward.’

      ‘The locket round her neck, and the key — is that the key to the trunk under her bed? Do you know what she keeps in there?’

      ‘These people don’t have very much, Inspector Jefe. If I see something private, I leave it for them. It’s all they have apart from … life. And it’s amazing how long you survive if that is all you have.’

      That was Ahmed. A perfectly intelligent, reasonable and caring individual, but not an expansive one, not in front of authority. He had irritated Falcón. He tried to picture him as the blackness ripped past the window of the AVE, just as he had done José Manuel Jiménez, whose tormented features were pin-sharp in his mind. He failed because Ahmed had done what all immigrants seek to do. He’d blended in. He didn’t stand out. He’d merged with his drab, grey surroundings and disappeared into modern Spanish society.

      The trickle of these thoughts stopped as he found that the transparent reflection of СКАЧАТЬ