The Blind Man of Seville (39 page)

‘How do you know that?’

‘Two sources. Your husband’s eldest son and my father’s journals.’

‘Your father and Raúl knew each other?’

‘They were in business together for some years in Tangier.’

‘What business?’

‘I think it’s my turn to be coy with the facts now, Doña Consuelo,’ said Falcón.

‘Anyway … what you were saying … Raúl’s attraction could have been quite innocent,’ she said. ‘It certainly wasn’t illegal.’

‘He was seeing the prostitute Eloisa Gómez who was not under-age but certainly looked it.’

‘He was married to me and had three children by me, too.’

‘Let’s not go back to being bellicose, Doña Consuelo. I only want to know why he felt the need to reward Edu-ardo Carvajal,’ said Falcón. ‘This is off the record and anything you say will not be construed as an admission of guilt. I want a pointer, that is all.’

‘I always tread carefully when everything that’s presented to me appears to be to my advantage.’

‘I’m sure, even here in Seville, you’ve maintained an ear well-tuned to the cracking of ice.’

‘That’s not much use to you if you’re already a long way from the river bank.’

‘Then tread carefully.’

She played with a new cigarette and the lighter.

‘You have a new theory,’ she said, pointing at him with the lighter.

‘I’m running an investigation. My job is to think creatively around insoluble problems. I never give up on old theories, but in the absence of breaks I have to examine new possibilities.’

‘I had no idea that police work could be so demanding.’

‘It depends on how you approach it.’

‘And
you
are the son of Francisco Falcón.’

‘He never thought very highly of my decision to join the police force.’

‘Even post-Franco I imagine it was full of undesirables,’ she said. ‘What made you join?’

‘Romance.’

‘You fell in love with a policewoman?’

‘I fell in love with American movies. I was entranced by the idea of the individual struggle against the ranged forces of evil.’

‘Is that how it turned out?’

‘No. It’s much messier. Evil rarely does us the favour of being pure. And we in the front line are not always as good as we should be.’

‘You’re rekindling my admiration, Don Javier.’

The thought that he might ignite anything in her gave him a strange satisfaction. Lights flickered in those byways of the spine. She lit her cigarette, blew smoke over his head.

‘Eduardo Carvajal … ‘ he said, to remind her.

‘So you think my husband’s killer might be an abused boy taking his revenge?’ she said. ‘I don’t think so, Don Javier. He was never that way inclined …’

‘A paedophile ring is rarely just abusing one child. They are numerous and with different tastes. Perhaps he is an abused boy taking revenge on behalf of others.’

‘Do you think someone like that would kill the prostitute as well?’ she said. ‘Surely they would consider themselves fellow victims?’

‘According to Eloisa Gómez’s sister they had become intimate to the point that he had given her hope. If he then revealed that his relationship with her had been for the sake of expediency she could become a dangerous entity, someone who might at a later date find herself needing to cut a deal with the police, for instance. She would be too dangerous to leave out there.’

‘You’ve thought this out.’

‘I only pursue it because of the reward your husband gave to Carvajal.’

‘You know what you’re doing, Don Javier?’

‘No.’

‘You’re putting me to work.’

‘You don’t know why?’

‘I never met Sr Carvajal.’

‘That might indicate that there was no business relationship between your husband and Sr Carvajal,’ said Falcón. ‘Had there been, you would have known him, no?’

‘He wasn’t involved in the restaurant trade.’

‘He was a businessman is all I know,’ said Falcón, getting up from his chair.

‘You’re leaving?’ she asked.

‘Our business is done.’

She leaned across the desk and looked up at him with her ice-blue eyes.

‘You know, when this is all over, Don Javier, you and I should have dinner.’

‘You might be disappointed,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘We’d never be able to recreate the tantalizing dynamic of you being a prime suspect in a murder case and me being the investigating officer.’

She laughed — throaty, unrestrained, sexy.

‘There was one other thing,’ he said as he reached the door. ‘We’d like to have a look at your phone records both business and domestic over the last two years. Can you make those available to us?’

Their eyes met and locked. She shook her head, smiled and picked up the phone.

22

Thursday, 19th April 2001, Edificio de los Juzgados, Seville

Falcón paced the floor outside Calderón’s office. He’d called him after his meeting with Consuelo Jiménez and they’d agreed to meet at six. It was already seven o’clock and the passing secretaries had given up on sympathetic glances. He was glad he wasn’t being made to wait by a fiscal in their offices above the Palacio de Justicia in the building next door, where he would have been tormented by all those people who knew him through Inés. It would have brought back those winter evenings when he’d picked her up from work and found himself at the centre of her bustling world. Her beauty attracted the excitement of fame. He was her lover. The chosen one. People had looked at him with searching eyes and broad smiles, wanting to know his secret. What has Javier Falcón got? Had he imagined all that? The way women had sniffed the air as he went by, and men had glanced over the urinal walls.

Pacing the floor outside Calderón’s office it suddenly hit him that it had all been about sex. He’d been caught up, not just in his own desire, but everybody else’s, too. He’d mistaken it, as had Inés. They’d thought it was the real thing, but it wasn’t. A fleeting physical attraction
had been hijacked by everybody’s need for romantic wish fulfilment. What should have been a few months of mad sex had been turned into a shotgun wedding — except it wasn’t the father with the weapon. It was sentiment.

Dr Spinola, the Magistrado Juez Decano de Sevilla, came out of Calderón’s office. He stopped to shake hands with Falcón and seemed on the brink of some intrusive questioning but gave up on the idea. Calderón called him into the office, apologized for keeping him waiting.

‘Dr Spinola’s not an easy man to throw out,’ said Falcón.

Calderón wasn’t listening. He searched the inside of his head, reached for a cigarette, lit it and inhaled deeply.

‘That’s the first time he’s ever come to any of our offices to discuss a specific case,’ he said, to the wall above Falcón’s head. ‘Normally I go to him and give him an overview.’

‘What’s he so concerned about?’

‘Good question,’ said Calderón. ‘I’m confused.’

‘If it’s to do with our case, maybe I can help,’ said Falcón.

In a fraction of a second Calderón weighed up the situation. Stripping his problem down to instinct he looked at Falcón, thinking: ‘Can this man be trusted?’ He decided no, but only just. If they’d had a few more moments like the one in the cemetery, Falcón thought that Calderón would have confided in him.

‘What have you got for me, Inspector Jefe?’ he asked. ‘No Inspector Ramírez today?’

Falcón had arrived without Ramírez because he wanted to develop a personal relationship with Calderón and at the same time cut back Ramírez’s access to information, force him out of the wider picture and into smaller parts of the puzzle. Now he’d changed his mind
again. Seeing Dr Spinola had made him cautious. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to have the name Carvajal floating about the corridors of the Edificio de los Juzgados. There was no logic to this other than the tenuous link of Spinola being in Jiménez’s celebrity photographs, along with León and Bellido, and Carvajal being on the MCA Consultores payroll. Leaking this in vague form to Consuelo Jiménez had been a calculated risk. First he’d wanted to see if she knew about it, which hadn’t been conclusive and he was sure that she would only see it as a way of taking the heat off herself. If Falcón made this more official via Juez Calderón there could be unknown repercussions. The leak could find its way back to Comisario León. The only problem now was that he had nothing to talk to Calderón about, except the one thing he was anxious to avoid.

‘You had an idea before we were sidetracked by Sergio’s text message,’ said Falcón.

‘Sergio?’

‘Our name for the killer. It was the one he used with Eloisa Gómez,’ said Falcón. ‘You remember, we were going to contact him, point up his mistakes and try to rile him into making more fatal ones.’

‘He left her mobile on the body,’ said Calderón.

‘But he still has Raúl Jiménez’s.’

‘Do we know anything more about Sergio since he acquired a name?’

‘Eloisa Gómez and her sister talked about him as a type. They described him as
un forastero,
an outsider.’

‘A foreigner?’

‘Forastero to them describes a mental state. He is someone who sees and understands things beyond the normal flow of everyday life. He knows how things really work. He has an automatic comprehension of what runs between the lines.’

This sounds very enigmatic, Inspector Jefe.’

‘Not on the margins of society, where people have detached themselves from normality. Where, for instance, every day they sell their bodies for sex, or shoot somebody because they haven’t got the money. It’s not so different at the other end of the scale. Those people with power, who know how to get more and how to maintain their position. None of these people see things as normal people do, who have jobs and children and houses to occupy their minds.’

‘And you think an artist, such as you described our killer back in the cemetery, would have this same unusual perspective?’ said Calderón.

‘It fits the profile,’ said Falcón. ‘You mentioned “foreigner”, too. Eloisa Gómez told her sister that although Sergio appeared to be Spanish there was something of the foreigner about him. He had foreign blood in him, or he’d been away from his Spanish roots.’

‘How should this alter our approach?’

‘I think pointing up a mistake is too obvious. He’d find it laughable. Forasteros know when they’re being manipulated.’

‘Maybe we should show him that we understand him.’

‘But as an artist,’ said Falcón. ‘We mustn’t be prosaic. We have to intrigue him as he does us. We’re still no closer to understanding that last sight lesson. “Why do they have to die, those that love to love?”’

‘Wasn’t he just telling us that he’d killed her because she’d seen him — the gift of perfect sight?’

‘But “those that love to love”? He’s presenting her as an emblem and he’s chosen a prostitute for his purpose. He’s trying to alter the way we see things and we have to do the same. We have to try to make him see something as if for the first time.’

‘So, all we need now is a resident genius,’ said Calderón. ‘Apparently this building is full of them, if you believe what you’re told.’

‘We borrow genius from the classics,’ said Falcón. ‘He’s a poet and an artist … that’s his language.’

“‘Los buenos pintores imitan la naturaleza, pero los malos la vomitan.
” Good painters imitate nature, bad ones spew it up. Cervantes.’

‘That might do the trick of annoying him as well,’ said Falcón.

‘But what are we trying to do with this strategy?’ asked Calderón. ‘What do we want from him?’

‘We’re trying to draw him in, start a dialogue, open him up. We want him to start leaking information to us.’

Falcón, losing his nerve at the last moment, thumbed the Cervantes line into the mobile and sent it as a text message. The two men sat back in their seats feeling stupid. Their investigative world reduced to the absurdity of sending lines of Cervantes into the ether.

Now they had to fall back on their own resources, but with no point of contact apart from a recognition of each other’s intelligence. Falcón wasn’t going to talk about football and Calderón wasn’t going to make him.

‘I saw a movie last night on video,’ said Calderón.
‘Todo sobre mi Madre —
‘All about my Mother’. Did you see it? It’s a Pedro Almodóvar film.’

‘Not yet,’ said Falcón, and an odd thing happened. His memory cracked open and for a second he was back in Tangier, splashing through the shallows and then up in the air, squealing.

‘You know what struck me about that movie?’ said Calderón. ‘In the first minutes of the film the director creates this incredibly intimate relationship between the son and the mother. And then the boy is killed soon after.
And … I’ve never had an experience like it; when he dies it’s like being the mother. You don’t think you’ll ever recover from that terrible loss. That’s genius, to my mind. To change a world in a few metres of celluloid.’

Falcón wanted to say something. He wanted to respond to this because, for once, there was something in this small talk. But it was too big. He couldn’t get it out. Only tears welled in his eyes, which he pinched away. Calderón, unconscious of Falcón’s struggle, shook his head in amazement.

‘We’ve got something here,’ said Calderón, picking up the mobile.

He read the small screen. A frown formed which transformed itself to pain.

‘Do you speak French?’ he asked, handing Falcón the mobile. ‘I mean, it’s simple, but … very strange.’

‘Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.’

Falcón felt ill, nauseous enough to vomit.

‘I understand it,’ said Calderón. ‘But what does it mean?’

“‘Today mother died. Or was it yesterday, I don’t know,”’
said Falcón. ‘And there’s more: “Don’t contact me again,
cabrón,
I will tell the story.”’

‘He’s turned it back on us,’ said Calderón. ‘But what does it mean?’

‘He couldn’t resist it,’ said Falcón. ‘He had to show us that he could go one better.’

‘But how?’

‘I think he’s probably had a French education,’ said Falcón.

‘That’s
a line of literature?’