The Blind Man of Seville (11 page)

‘We still have Sra Consuelo Jiménez as the prime suspect. She is the only one with defined motive and she has the means to execute it. Eloisa Gómez is a possible accomplice to a murderer acting on his own.’

‘Or not,’ said Calderón. ‘The killer could still be paid for by Sra Jiménez and, if that’s the case, I’m sure she wouldn’t want to draw attention to herself by giving the killer his own key. She would have told him to find his own way in.’

‘And he’d use the prostitute or the lifting gear?’ asked Ramírez. ‘I know what I’d do.’

‘If he used the girl to get in why would he film her?’ asked Calderón. ‘That doesn’t make sense. It makes more
sense the other way round — to show us how brilliant he is.’

‘There’s possibilities and improbabilities in both scenarios,’ said Falcón.

‘Do you both have Sra Jiménez down as a serious candidate for having her husband killed?’

Ramírez said yes, Falcón no.

‘Which way do
you
want to take the case, Inspector Jefe?’

Falcón cracked his knuckles one by one. Calderón winced. Falcón didn’t want to have to come clean just yet about what his instinct was telling him. He needed more time to think. There were enough extraordinary things about this case already without him suggesting that they take a look at what had happened to Raúl Jiménez in the late 1960s. But he was the leader and as such he had to have the ideas.

‘We should work on both scenarios and on Raúl Jiménez’s address list,’ he said. ‘I think we have to maintain a presence in and around the building to try to find a witness who will corroborate one theory of the killer’s entry and possibly give us a description. We need to interview the removals company. And we should keep the pressure up on both Consuelo Jiménez and Eloisa Gómez.’

There was no argument from Calderón.

They were driving back to the Jefatura on Blas Infante. Ramírez was at the wheel. As they crossed the river to the Plaza de Cuba, the advertisement for Cruzcampo beer triggered a sudden parched quality to the Inspector’s throat. He wouldn’t mind one, he thought, but not with Falcón. He wanted to drink with somebody more convivial than Falcón.

What do you think, Inspector Jefe?’ he asked, jerking
Falcón out of his reflection on how awkward his first meeting with the young judge had been.

‘I think more or less what I said to Juez Calderón.’

‘No, no, I don’t think so,’ said Ramírez, tapping the steering wheel. ‘I know you, Inspector Jefe.’

That turned Falcón in his seat. The idea that Ramírez had the first idea on how his mind worked was nearly laughable to him.

‘Tell me, Inspector,’ he said.

‘You were telling him things while you were thinking something else,’ replied Ramírez. ‘I mean, you know that going through that address book is going to be as big a waste of time as, say, interviewing those kids that Sra Jiménez fired.’

‘I don’t know that,’ said Falcón. ‘And
you
know that the basics have to be done. We have to be seen to be thorough.’

‘But you don’t think there’s a connection, do you?’

‘I’ve an open mind.’

‘This is the work of a psychopath and you know it, Inspector Jefe.’

‘If I was a psychopath and I enjoyed killing people, I wouldn’t choose an apartment on the sixth floor of the Edificio Presidente with all the complications it-entailed.’

‘He likes to show off.’

‘He’s studied these people. He’s got to know his target. He’s been specific,’ said Falcón. ‘He will have seen them visiting their new house. He will have seen the removals people coming to the apartment …’

‘We need to talk to
them
first thing tomorrow,’ said Ramírez. ‘Missing overalls, that sort of thing.’

‘It’s
Viernes Santo
tomorrow,’ said Falcón. Good Friday.

Ramírez pulled into the car park at the back of the Jefatura.

‘Motive,’ he said, getting out of the car. ‘Why are you taking the bitch out of the frame?’

‘The bitch?’

‘Those boys I spoke to, the ones who were glad to get away from Consuelo Jiménez, they didn’t have a good word to say about her personally, but professionally, they said she was brilliant.’

‘And that’s unusual in Seville?’ said Falcón.

‘It is for that kind of woman, the wife of a rich husband. Normally they don’t like to get their hands dirty and they’ll only talk to the Marqués y Marquesa de No Sé Que. But Sra Jiménez, apparently, did everything.’

‘Like?’

‘She washed salad, chopped vegetables, cooked
revuel-tos,
waited at table, went to the market, paid the wages and kept the books, and she did the talking and the greeting, too.’

‘So what’s your point?’

‘She loved that business. She made it
her
business. The new place they opened in La Macarena — that was
her
idea. She made all the drawings, supervised the building of the interiors, decorated it, found the right staff — everything. The only thing she didn’t touch was the menu, because she knows that people go there for the menu. Simple, classic Sevillano dishes done to perfection.’

‘You sound as if you’ve been there?’

‘Best salmorejo in Seville. Best pan de casa in Seville. Best jamón, best revueltos, best chuletillas … best everything. And reasonable, too. Not exclusive either, although they always keep a table for the toreros and other idiots.’

Ramírez shouldered through the door at the back of the Jefatura, held it open for Falcón and followed him up the stairs.

‘Where are you taking me on this?’ asked Falcón.

‘How do you think she’d react, say, if her husband
decided to sell the business?’ asked Ramírez, which stopped Falcón mid step. ‘I didn’t bring it up in front of Calderón, because I’ve only got those two boys’ word for it.’

‘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?

8

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 was absurd. There was no connection to the case. What difference would it make if he did see either of his parents in these photographs? What if they were in Tangier at the same time as Raúl and Gumersinda Jiménez? So were 40,000 other Spaniards. As he built the argument against his illogical muddling so his fascination grew and it occurred to him briefly that he might just be getting old.

The yacht photographs, which were just shots of Raúl Jiménez’s new toy, didn’t interest him until he came to one of the harbour full of boats and people partying on the decks. Jiménez and his wife and children were in the foreground. They looked happy. His wife was waving with the two kids over her knees giggling. Falcón shifted the magnifying glass up and along through the other boats lined up behind Jiménez’s. He stopped, slid back to a couple on the deck and dismissed the likeness. He carried on and then returned to the couple and realized why he’d dismissed them. It was his father and he was leaning on the ship’s rail of a yacht, much larger than Raúl’s. He was with a woman whose face he could not see properly but who had blonde hair. They were kissing. It was a quick, private moment that the Jiménez photographer had inadvertently caught. He checked the back.
Tangier, August 1958.
Pilar, his mother, would still have been alive. He looked at the blonde woman more closely and was stunned to find that it was Mercedes, his father’s second
wife. He felt nauseous and pushed the magnifying glass away. He pressed his palms into his eyes. That’s what happened when you went off on a tangent … you came across unexpected truths. It was the whole reason he did it.

The phone rang — his sister on a mobile in a packed bar.

‘I knew I’d find you at home if you weren’t at work,’ said Manuela. ‘What are you doing, little brother?’