The Blind Man of Seville. Robert Thomas Wilson

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СКАЧАТЬ series of cuts showed Consuelo Jiménez arriving at the same house on different days, in different clothes. Then the house number — 17. And the street name — Calle Río de la Plata.

      ‘That’s in El Porvenir,’ said Ramírez.

      ‘This is the future,’ said Calderón. ‘I think we have a lover here.’

      Cut to night-time and the rear of a large E-Class Mercedes with a Seville number plate. The image held for some time.

      ‘He doesn’t move his plot on very well,’ said Calderón, reaching his boredom threshold quickly.

      ‘Suspense,’ said Falcón.

      Finally Raúl Jiménez got out of the car, locked it, stepped out of the street lighting and into the dark. Cut to a fire burning in the night, figures standing around the leaping flames. Women in short skirts, some with their suspenders and stocking tops showing. One of them turned, bent over and put her bottom to the fire.

      Raúl Jiménez appeared at the edge of the fire. An inaudible discussion ensued. He strode back to the Mercedes with one of the women following, stumbling in her high heels over the rough ground.

      ‘That’s the Alameda,’ said Ramírez.

      ‘Only the cheapest for Raúl Jiménez,’ said Falcón.

      Jiménez pushed the girl into the back seat, holding her head down as if she were a police suspect. He looked up and around and followed her in. The frame held the rear door of the Mercedes, shadowy movements beyond the glass. No more than a minute passed and Jiménez got out of the car, straightened his fly and held out a note to the girl, who took it. Jiménez got back into the driver’s seat. The car pulled away. The girl spat a fat gob on to the dirt, cleared her throat and spat again.

      ‘That was quick,’ said Ramírez, predictable.

      More night-time footage followed. The pattern was the same, until an abrupt change of scene put the camera in a corridor with light falling into it from an open door at the end on the left. The camera moved down the corridor gradually revealing a lighter square on the wall at the end with a hook above it. The three men were suddenly transfixed, as they knew they were looking at the corridor outside the room where they were sitting. Ramírez’s hand twitched in that direction. The camera shook. The suspense tightened as the three lawmen’s heads surged with the horror of what they might be about to see. The camera reached the edge of light, its microphone picked up some groaning from the room, a shuddering, whimpering moan of someone who might be in terrible agony. Falcón wanted to swallow but his throat refused. He had no spit.

      ‘Joder,’ said Ramírez, to break the tension.

      The camera panned and they were in the room. Falcón was so spooked that he half expected to see the three of them sitting there, watching the box. The camera focused first on the TV, which, at this remove, was running with waves and flickering but not so much that they couldn’t see the graphic performance of a woman masturbating and felating a man whose bare buttocks clenched and unclenched in time.

      The camera pulled back to a wide shot, Falcón still blinking at the confusion of sound and expected image. Kneeling on the Persian carpet looking up at the TV screen was Raúl Jiménez, shirt-tails hanging over his backside, socks halfway up his calves and his trousers in a pile behind him. On all fours in front of him was a girl with long black hair, whose still head informed Falcón that she was staring at a fixed point, thinking herself elsewhere. She was making the appropriate encouraging noises. Then her head began to turn and the camera spun wildly out of the room.

      Falcón was on his feet, thighs crashing into the edge of the desk.

      ‘He was there,’ he said. ‘He was … I mean, he was here all the time.’

      Ramírez and Calderón jerked in their seats at Falcón’s outburst. Calderón ran his hand through his hair, visibly shaken. He checked the door from where the camera had just been looking into the room. Falcón’s mind bolted, didn’t know what it was looking at any more. Image or reality. He started, went on to his back foot, tried to shake his vision free of what was in his head. There was someone standing in the doorway. Falcón pinched his eyes shut, reopened them. He knew this person. Time decelerated. Calderón crossed the room with his hand out.

      ‘Señora Jiménez,’ he said. ‘Juez Esteban Calderón, I am sorry for your loss.’

      He introduced Ramírez and Falcón, and Sra Jiménez, with mustered dignity, stepped into the room as if over a dead body. She shook hands with the men.

      ‘We weren’t expecting you so soon,’ said Calderón.

      ‘The traffic was light,’ she said. ‘Did I startle you, Inspector Jefe?’

      Falcón adjusted his face, which must have had the remnants of that earlier wildness.

      ‘What was that you were watching?’ she asked, assuming control of the situation, used to it.

      They looked at the screen. Snow and white noise.

      ‘We weren’t expecting you … ‘ started Calderón.

      ‘But what was it, Señor Juez? This is my apartment. I should like to know what you were looking at on my television.’

      With Calderón taking the pressure, Falcón watched at leisure and, although he was sure he didn’t know her, he at least knew the type. This was the sort of woman who would have turned up at his father’s house, when the great man was still alive, looking to buy one of his late works. Not the special stuff, which had made him famous. That was long gone to American collectors and museums around the world. This type was looking to buy the more affordable Seville work — the details of buildings: a door, a church dome, a window, a balcony. She would have been one of those tasteful women, with or without tiresome wealthy husband in tow, who wanted to have their slice of the old man.

      ‘We were watching a video, which had been left in the apartment,’ said Calderón.

      ‘Not one of my husband’s … ‘ she said, hesitating perfectly to let them know that ‘dirty’ or ‘blue’ was unnecessary. ‘We had few secrets … and I did happen to see the last few seconds of what you were watching.’

      ‘It was a video, Doña Consuelo,’ said Falcón, ‘which had been left here by your husband’s murderer. We are the three officers of the law who will be running the investigation into your husband’s death and I thought it important that we saw the film as soon as possible. Had we known that you would be so prompt …’

      ‘Do I know you, Inspector Jefe?’ she asked. ‘Have we met?’

      She turned to face him full on, her dark fur-collared coat open, a black dress underneath. Not someone to be inappropriately dressed for any occasion. She gave him the full force of her attractiveness. Her blonde hair was not quite so structured as in the desk photograph but the eyes were bigger, bluer and icier in reality. Her lips, which controlled and manipulated her dominating voice, were edged with a dark line just in case you might be foolish enough to think that her soft, pliable mouth could be disobeyed.

      ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

      ‘Falcón … ‘ she said, feeling the rings on her fingers as she looked him up and down. ‘No, it’s too ridiculous.’

      ‘What СКАЧАТЬ