The Silent and the Damned (15 page)

'How easy is that to get hold of?'

'Any hardware store would sell it to you under the name of muriatic acid. It's used for cleaning cement off paving stones, for instance.'

'We'll check his garage,' said Falcón, making a note. 'There's no going back once you've ingested something that strong?'

'Irreparable damage would be done to the throat, digestive tract and, in this case, the lungs as well.'

'How did it get into the lungs?'

'It's very difficult to tell what damage was caused by force or violence and what was caused by the corrosiveness of the liquid. I would say that he, or someone else, had rammed the bottle down his throat. Under those circumstances some of the liquid would inevitably find its way into the lungs. There's evidence of corrosive action in the nasal passages, so product was being coughed up. With the mouth occupied by the bottle the only way out was via the nose.'

'You seem to think he could have accomplished this on his own.'

'I have to say that's doubtful.'

'But not impossible?'

'If you were going to kill yourself in this horrible way I imagine that you would try and put yourself beyond rescue by making sure you ingested as much of the product as possible in the first moments. I think there would be a certain amount of nervousness involved, too… and that would cause you to ram the neck of the bottle down your throat. That of course would also set off the gagging mechanism. I think it would be a messy business, unless there was someone holding the bottle in place and holding the victim steady as well.'

'The floor was clean apart from some droplets close to the neck of the bottle.'

'There was spotting on his chest and clothes, but nothing like the quantities you'd expect if he gagged and spurted it out all over.'

'Any evidence of holding – marks on arms, wrist, neck, head?'

'Nothing on the wrists. There are burn marks on the arms in the crooks of his elbows, but the dressing gown had slipped down and it's possible that happened as he writhed in agony on the floor. There are marks on the head and neck, and claw marks on the throat. I would say they are self-inflicted. He had product on his hands. But the marks could just as easily have been made by someone holding him in a kind of neck lock.'

'You know what I'm trying to do here, Doctor,' said Falcón. 'I've got to go back to Juez Calderón and show him conclusive proof that someone else was in the room with Sr Vega, who was responsible for his death. If I can't do that there may well be no murder inquiry. Now, if I'm not mistaken, you think, like me and the forensics, that it was probably murder.'

'But conclusive proof of another party's presence is more difficult,' said the Médico Forense.

'Is there anything that would link Sr Vega to the death of his wife?'

'I didn't find anything. Sr Vega had only his own tissue under his fingernails from clawing at his throat.'

'Anything else?'

'What's the psychological profile of the victims?'

'She was suffering from mental illness,' said Falcón. 'He doesn't seem to have been suicidal, but there are questionable aspects to his mental state.'

Falcón gave a brief resume of what he'd been told by Dr Rodríguez and how disturbed Vega had been since the beginning of the year.

'I see what you mean,' said the Médico Forense. 'This could go either way.'

'To balance that, the victim had a 9mm handgun, a surveillance system he didn't use and bulletproof windows.'

'Expecting trouble.'

'Or just a nervous, wealthy person close to the Poligono San Pablo.'

'And the unused surveillance system?'

'Nerves again,' said Falcón. 'Maybe his mentally ill wife was paranoid. She showed off to her neighbours about the windows. Or possibly Vega himself wanted to discourage outsiders but not leave a record of people who came to the house.'

'Because he's involved in something criminal?'

'A neighbour saw some Russian visitors who didn't look like they'd come from the Bolshoi.'

'There's plenty of talk about the Russian mafia these days, especially down on the Costa del Sol, but I didn't know they'd reached Seville,' said the Médico Forense.

'This is a nasty way to die, isn't it, Doctor?'

'Revenge or punishment, maybe an example to others. What about his sex life?'

'His father-in-law says he was reluctant to perform his marital duties… ever, even before his wife got depressed. The mother-in-law reckoned he was having an affair which went wrong, which was why he'd been so withdrawn since the beginning of the year,' said Falcón. 'Is there anything else I should know?'

'Just one curious thing. He's had some cosmetic surgery done to his eyes and neck. Nothing extraordinary, just bags removed from under the eyes, and skin removed from the neck to tighten up and reveal the jawline.'

'Everybody's having cosmetic surgery these days.'

'That's true, and this is the curious thing. The work is pretty old. Difficult to say exactly how old, but more than ten years.'

On the way back to the Jefatura Falcón drove while Ferrera read the autopsy reports. It was lunch time, the temperature had now reached 45°C. There was no one on the streets. Cars bulldozed the heat down the shimmering tarmac. When they arrived at the Jefatura he told Ferrera to leave the reports on Ramírez's desk and they would reconvene at 6 p.m.

The heat had broken Falcón's appetite. At home he managed a bowl of gazpacho, of which Encarnación made a daily supply. He could not find the energy, with the heat crammed into every corner of the house, to look through the Jiménez photographs he'd brought in from the car. He went upstairs, stripped and showered and collapsed into the air-conditioned cool of his bedroom. His brain wavered and released images of the day. He lurched into sleep and a recurring dream where he entered a public toilet which was pristine until he flushed it, whereupon it started filling up with sickening quantities of shit until it overflowed. He found himself trapped and had to climb the walls of the cubicle, only to find all the other toilets were doing the same thing so that he felt a rush of nausea followed by a deep animal panic. He woke up, his hair full of sweat and his mind inexplicably latched on to Pablo Ortega until he remembered the actor's cesspit problem.

It was 5.30 p.m. The shower drilled the muck out of his hair and head. His mind tripped forwards and backwards under the pummelling water. He knew why he had dreamt the dream – another investigation, his own past and the past of others all rucked up by the tragedy. What he was unprepared for was his mind's next leap, which told him that he should go and visit Pablo Ortega's son, Sebastián, in prison. This would be nothing to do with his investigation, just a separate mission. The idea made him feel good. Something creaked open in his chest. He felt more able to breathe.

He took the Jiménez photographs into the study and pulled out the shots of Pablo Ortega. There was one of Pablo smiling and talking to two men. One of these men was obscured by people in the foreground and the other man he did not know. He took the photo with him, put it on the passenger seat.

Ramírez was typing up his report on his interviews in Vega's offices and the latest on the search for Sergei. Falcón told him about the passport in the name of Emilio Cruz and the key. Ramírez took down the details.

'I'll e-mail this to the Argentinean Embassy in Madrid, see what they make of it,' said Ramírez. 'And I'll put a trace right back to the original issuing office on Rafael Vega's ID.'

'Can we get something on that before the weekend?'

'Not in July, but we can try.'

'Any news on Sergei?'

'He was seen some time in the last couple of weeks in a bar on Calle Alvar Nunez Caleza de Vaca with a woman who was not Spanish and talked the same language as him. The woman had been seen there before and the barman thought she came from the Poligono San Pablo. He also thought she was a hooker. We've got a full description and Serrano and Baena are working with it now.'

Falcón listened to his messages, staring at the photograph he'd brought up from the car. Calderón had postponed their meeting until the following morning. He put a call through to Inspector Jefe Alberto Montes from GRUME (Grupo de Menores), who was responsible for crimes against children, and asked if he could pass by for an informal chat. Ferrera arrived as he was leaving and he told her to work on the phone numbers listed beside calls in and out of the Vegas' house and Rafael Vega's mobile, and then join Serrano and Baena looking for the woman seen with Sergei.

'What about the key we found with the passport in Vega's house?'

'Sergei is more important at this stage. We need a witness,' said Falcón. 'Work on the key if you have time. Start with the banks.'

On the way up to Montes's office he dropped in on Felipe and Jorge in the lab. He talked them through the autopsies. They looked dismal. They had nothing to offer from the crime scene. The pillow had been clean of any sweat or saliva. The only curious thing they'd come across was to do with the note in Vega's hand.

'As his lawyer said, it's clearly his own handwriting, but we thought it interesting that he should describe it as "careful" so I looked at it under the microscope,' said Felipe. 'It's traced over.'

'What do you mean?'

'He'd written it before, which left an indent on the page beneath, then he'd gone back to the pad and traced over the indent… as if he wanted to see what had been written.'

'But
he'd
written it in the first place?' said Falcón.

'I can only tell you the facts,' said Felipe.

Alberto Montes was in his early fifties, overweight, with bags under his eyes and a nose that had exploded from excessive drinking. He'd undergone a psychological assessment at the end of last year because of the drinking problem and had somehow got through it. He was looking at early retirement now and seemed anxious to get there. He had been with the Grupo de Libertad Sexual, which investigated adult sex crimes, and GRUME for over fifteen years and held an encyclopaedic knowledge of names and the horrors attached to them. He sat turned away from his desk, looking out of his second-floor window, smoking and presumably thinking of future freedom. He strained water from a plastic cup through his thick moustache as if he was wishing it was whisky. As Falcón reached his desk he swivelled in his chair and refilled the plastic cup.

'Kidney stones, Inspector Jefe,' he said. 'They get me every summer. I've been told to drink six litres of water a day. What can I do for you?'

'Eduardo Carvajal,' said Falcón. 'Remember him?'

'He's burnt on my heart, that guy. He was going to make me famous,' said Montes. 'Why has his name suddenly reappeared?'

'I'm investigating the deaths of Rafael and Lucia Vega.'

'Rafael Vega… the constructor?' said Montes.

'Do you know him?'

'I don't get invited to his caseta in the Feria, but I know who he is,' said Montes. 'Did somebody kill him?'

'That's what we're trying to find out. While I was going through his address book I came across Carvajal and it was a name that rang bells from that case I investigated last year – he was known to, and a friend of, Raúl Jiménez. I didn't have time to dig him up then so I thought I'd try now,' said Falcón. 'How was he going to make you famous?'

'He said he was going to give me all the names of everybody who'd been a part of his paedophile ring… ever. He promised me the biggest coup of my career. Politicians, actors, lawyers, councillors, businessmen. He said he would bring me the golden key which would open up high society and reveal it for the rotten, stinking egg it really was. And I believed him. I genuinely thought he was going to come through with the information.'

'But he died in a car crash before he could deliver.'

'Well, he came off the road,' said Montes. 'It was late at night, there was alcohol in his system and it was a very tricky series of bends from Ronda to San Pedro de Alcántara… but we'll never know.'

'What does that mean?'

'All this is pretty well known, Inspector Jefe. By the time I'd been notified, he'd been buried and the car was a block in a breaker's yard about that big -' said Montes, holding his hands fifty centimetres apart.

'But some people were convicted, weren't they?'

Montes held up four fat fingers with a cigarette burning amongst them.

'And they couldn't help you in the same way that Carvajal could?'

'They only knew each other. They were one cell in the ring,' said Montes. 'They're careful, these people. It's no different to a terrorist outfit or a resistance movement.'

'How did you get to them in the first place?'

'I'm ashamed to have to tell you it was through the FBI,' said Montes. 'We can't even crack our own paedophile rings.'

'So it was international?'

'That's the internet for you,' said Montes. 'The FBI were running a sting operation. They found a couple in Idaho who were managing a child porn site and they took it over. They picked up addresses from all over the world and informed the local authorities in each country. It's good to know that there are a lot of scared paedophiles out there, but I don't think we'll pull in any of the people that Carvajal knew. I'm sure that's all finished.'

'Why?'

'Carvajal was the key man. He was procuring. They knew him. He knew them. But they didn't know each other. There's nothing to hold it together.'

'But what was Carvajal doing out of custody on his own?'

'That was part of the deal negotiated with his lawyer. He was going to pull all the different cells together and we were going to scoop the lot in a series of raids.'

'Did you find out how he was procuring?'

'Not that it did us much good,' said Montes, nodding.