The Blind Man of Seville (4 page)

‘Did you find who you were looking for?’ asked Sra Jiménez from behind him.

She was out of her coat, wearing a black cardigan and leaning against a guest chair. Her eyes were pink-rimmed despite the make-up repair.

‘I’m sorry you saw that,’ he said, nodding at the television.

‘I’d been warned,’ she said, taking a packet of Marlboro Lights out of her cardigan pocket and lighting one with a Bic from the desk. She threw the pack on the desk, offering him one. He shook his head. Falcón was used to this ritual sizing up. He didn’t mind. It gave him time, too.

He saw a woman about the same age as himself and well groomed, maybe over groomed. There was a lot of jewellery on her fingers whose nails were too long and too pink. Her earrings clustered on her lobes, winking from the nest of her blonde helmet. The make-up, even for a repair job, was heavily slapped on. The cardigan was the only simple thing about her. The black dress would have worked well had it not had a hem of lace which, rather than bringing grief to mind, brought sex awkwardly into contention. She had square shoulders and an uplifted bust and was full-bodied with no extra fat. There was something of the health club fitness regime about her, the way the straps of muscle in her neck framed her larynx and her calf muscles were delineated beneath her black stockings. She was what the English would call handsome.

She saw a fit man in a perfectly cut suit with all his hair, which had gone prematurely grey but belonged to a class of person who would never think of returning it to its original black. He wore lace-up shoes and the tightness of the bows led her to believe that this was someone who rarely unbuttoned his jacket. The handkerchief in his breast pocket she assumed was always there but never used. She imagined that he had a lot of ties and that he wore them all the time, even at weekends, possibly in bed. She saw a man who was contained, trussed and bound. He did not give out, which may have
been a professional attitude but she thought not. She did not see a Sevillano, not a natural one anyway.

‘You said earlier, Doña Consuelo, that you and your husband had few secrets.’

‘We should sit,’ she said, pointing him into her husband’s desk chair with her cigarette fingers and pivoting the guest chair round with some dexterity. She sat quickly, slipped sideways on to one of the arms and crossed her legs so that the lace hem rode up her calf.

‘Are you married, Inspector Jefe?’

‘This is an investigation into your husband’s murder,’ he said flatly.

‘It’s relevant.’

‘I
was
married,’ he said.

She smoked and counted her fingers with her thumb.

‘You didn’t need to tell me that,’ she said. ‘You could have left it at “Yes”.’

‘These are games we should not be playing,’ he said. ‘Every hour that goes past takes us an hour away from your husband’s death. These hours are important. They count more than the hours, say, in three or four days’ time.’

‘You’ve separated from your wife?’ she said.

‘Doña Consuelo …’

‘I’ll be quick,’ she said, and batted the smoke away from between them.

‘We are separated.’

‘After how long?’

‘Eighteen months.’

‘How did you meet her?’

‘She’s a public prosecutor. I met her at the Palacio de Justicia.’

‘So, a union of truth hunters,’ she said, and Falcón searched her for irony.

‘We are not making progress, Doña Consuelo.’

‘I think we are.’

‘I might be satisfying your curiosity …’

‘It’s more than curiosity.’

‘You are reversing the procedure. It is
I
who have to find out about
you.’

‘To see whether I killed my husband,’ she said. ‘Or had him killed.’

Silence.

‘You see, Inspector Jefe, you’re going to find out everything about us, you’re going to dig into our lives. You’re going to strip down my husband’s business affairs, you’re going to probe his private life, uncover his little uglinesses — his blue movies, his cheap whores, his cheap … cheap cigarettes.’

She leaned over and picked up the pack of Celtas and threw them across the desk so that they skidded into Falcón’s lap.

‘And you won’t let
me
alone. I’ll be your prime suspect. You saw that horrible thing,’ she said, waving at the television behind her.

‘Number 17 Calle Río de la Plata?’

‘Exactly. My lover, Inspector Jefe. You’ll be talking to him too, no doubt.’

‘What’s his name?’ he asked, getting out his pen and notebook for the first time, down to business at last.

‘He is the third son of the Marqués de Palmera. His name is Basilio Tomás Lucena.’

Did he detect pride in that? He wrote it down.

‘How old is he?’

‘Thirty-six, Inspector Jefe,’ she said. ‘You’ve started before I’ve finished.’

‘This is progress.’

‘Did she meet somebody else?’

‘Who?’

‘The public prosecutor.’

‘This isn’t …’

‘Did she?’

‘No.’

‘That’s hard,’ she said. ‘I think that’s harder.’

‘What?’ he asked, instantly annoyed with himself for snatching at her bait.

‘To be dumped because she would rather be alone.’

That slid into him like a white-hot needle. His head came up slowly.

Sra Jiménez looked around the room as if it was her first time in it.

‘Were you aware that your husband was taking Viagra?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Did his doctor know?’

‘I imagine so.’

‘You must have been aware of the risks for a man in his seventies.’

‘He was as strong as a bull.’

‘He’d lost weight.’

‘Doctor’s orders. Cholesterol.’

‘He must have been very disciplined.’

‘I was disciplined for him, Inspector Jefe.’

‘I should have thought as a restaurateur, with all that food around …’

‘I hire and run all the staff in the restaurants,’ she said. ‘They were threatened with the sack if they gave him so much as a crumb.’

‘Did you lose many?’

‘They are Sevillanos, Inspector Jefe, who, as you probably know, rarely take anything seriously. We lost three before they understood.’

‘I’m a Sevillano.’

‘Then you must have been abroad for a long time to learn your … gravity.’

‘I was in Barcelona for twelve years and four years each in Zaragoza and Madrid before I arrived back here.’

‘It sounds as if you’ve been demoted.’

‘My father was ill. I asked to be transferred to be close to him.’

‘Did he recover?’

‘No. He didn’t make it to the new millennium.’

‘We
have
met before, Inspector Jefe,’ she said, stubbing out the cigarette.

‘Then I don’t remember.’

‘At your father’s funeral,’ she said. ‘We
are
talking about Francisco Falcón.’

‘You couldn’t believe it before,’ he said, thinking: Let’s see how this changes your tune.

‘Was that who you were looking for in the photographs?’ she asked, and he nodded. ‘You wouldn’t find him there. He was not Raúl’s kind of celebrity. He never came to any of the restaurants. I doubt they knew each other. I went to the funeral because
I
knew him. I own three of his paintings.’

He imagined his father with Consuelo Jiménez. His father had liked attractive women, especially if they bought his stupid paintings … but this one? Maybe that would have interested him. The showy, slightly tacky dresser with a razor tongue and a well-honed intuition. The usual crowd who bought his paintings always tried to say something ‘intelligent’ about them, when there was nothing intelligent in them. Consuelo Jiménez wouldn’t have done that. She would have found something different to say to his father, perhaps made a personal observation, even attempted a small perception, which most people, standing under the fierce reflection of his colossal fame, would never have dared. Yes. And his father would have risen to that. Definitely.

‘So you were completely involved in your husband’s business affairs?’ he said.

‘What happened to his house on Calle Bailén?’

‘I live in it,’ he said. ‘And you would know if your husband had any enemies.’

‘On your own?’

‘Just as he did,’ said Falcón. ‘Your husband … he must have trodden on people on his way up to the top. There are probably people out there who would …’

‘Yes, there are people out there who would gladly see him dead, especially those he’d corrupted and who are now free from the weight of their obligation.’

She flicked a derisory fingernail at the functionary end of the photograph gallery.

‘If you know something … it would help.’

‘Ignore me. I’m being facetious,’ she said. ‘If there had been any corruption I would not have known about it. I ran the restaurants. I designed the interiors. I organized the flower arrangements. I made sure the produce for the kitchens was of the highest quality. But, as you can probably imagine, even without knowing my husband, I did not make contact with a single peseta of real money, nor did I deal with any of the powers, legal or otherwise, who let Raúl build, who licensed him, and who made sure there were no … unforeseen circumstances.’

‘So it is possible that …’

‘Very unlikely, Inspector Jefe. If something goes wrong in that department the stink soon gets into the restaurants and nothing reached my nose smelling that bad.’

Falcón decided he’d let this woman run free for long enough. It was time she understood what had happened here. Time she stopped looking at this as a news item that didn’t affect her. Time to bring her inside.

‘Your husband’s body is undergoing an autopsy at the
moment. In due course we will have to go to the Instituto Anatómico Forense for you to identify the body. You will see for yourself that your husband’s murder was extraordinary, more extraordinary than any I have seen in my career.’

‘I saw the killer’s little production for myself, Inspector Jefe. To spy on a family like that you would have to be profoundly disturbed.’

‘You happened to see the last few moments of the video when you first arrived. Perhaps you were not aware of what you were looking at,’ he said. ‘Your husband was entertaining a prostitute in here last night. The killer filmed it. We think that he may have got into this apartment much earlier, around lunchtime, using the removals company’s lifting gear, and that he was hiding in here, waiting for his moment.’

Her eyes widened. She grabbed for the cigarettes and lit up, spanned her forehead with her hand.

‘I was here yesterday afternoon with the children before we went to the Hotel Colón,’ she said, on her feet now, pacing the length of the desk.

‘We found your husband sitting in the twin of that chair,’ said Falcón, not taking his eyes off her. ‘His forearms, ankles and head had been secured with flex. He was barefoot because his socks had been used to gag him. He was being forced to watch something on the screen, something so horrific to him that he fought with all his strength not to see it.’

As he said this it occurred to him that it was only half true. The on-screen horror might have been the start of it, but what made Raúl Jiménez writhe convulsively was coming round in agony to find that a madman had cut his eyelids off. After that he’d have known there was nothing to lose and he’d have fought like a dog until his heart gave out.

‘What was he being forced to watch?’ she asked, confused. ‘I didn’t see …’

‘What you saw had a certain amount of horror for you personally. Being stalked is creepy, but it’s not something that you would fight to the point of self-mutilation not to see.’

She sat down straight in the chair, knees pressed together like a good little girl. She leaned forward, grasping her shins, holding herself in.

‘I can’t think,’ she said. ‘I can’t think of anything like that.’

‘Nor can I,’ said Falcón.

She drew on the cigarette, spat out the smoke as if it was disgusting. Falcón searched for any hint of pretence.

‘I can’t think,’ she said it again.

‘You
have
to think, Doña Consuelo, because you have to go over every minute that you spent with Raúl Jiménez plus everything you know about his life before you met him and you must tell it all … to me and then perhaps between us we can find the small crack … the …’

‘The small crack?’

Falcón’s mind went blank. What crack was he talking about? An opening. A chink. But into what?

‘We might find something that will give us an insight,’ he said. ‘Yes, an insight.’

‘Into what?’

‘Into what your husband feared,’ said Falcón, losing his thread.

‘He had nothing
to
fear. There was nothing frightening in his life.’

Falcón reined in his thoughts. His fear? What was he thinking of? What was this man’s fear going to tell him?

‘Your husband had certain … tastes,’ said Falcón, fingering the pack of Celtas. ‘Here we are in one of the
most prestigious apartment buildings in Seville, or at least they were fifteen years ago …’

‘Which was about when he bought it,’ she said. ‘I never liked it here.’

‘And where were you moving to?’

‘Heliopolis.’

‘Another expensive place to live,’ said Falcón. ‘He has four of the most well-known restaurants in Seville attended by the rich, the powerful and the celebrated. And yet … Celtas, which he smoked with the filters broken off. And yet … cheap prostitutes picked up in the Alameda.’

‘That was only a recent development. No more than two years … since … since Viagra became available. He was impotent for three years before that.’

‘His taste in tobacco probably goes back to a time when he had no money. When was that?’

‘I don’t know, he never talked about it.’

‘Where does he come from?’

‘He never talked about that either,’ she said. ‘We Spanish don’t have such a glorious past that his generation would choose to wallow in it.’

‘What do you know about his parents?’

‘That they’re both dead.’

Consuelo Jiménez was no longer maintaining eye contact. Her ice-blue eyes roved the room.

‘When did you and Raúl Jiménez meet?’

‘At the Feria de Abril in 1989. I was invited to his caseta by a mutual friend. He danced a very good Sevillana … not the usual shuffling about that you see from the men. He had it in him. We made a very good pair.’