The Silent and the Damned (32 page)

'The room where he died is still officially a crime scene, so you'd better not go in there,' said Falcón.

Ignacio went off into the house. Falcón waited and went to the corridor. Ignacio was in the bedroom. The door was open a crack. Ignacio was madly searching the room. He went under the bed. He lifted the mattress. He surveyed the room, mouth set, eyes penetrating- He went through the clothes in the wardrobe, checked the pockets. Falcón backed down the hall and resumed his seat.

They left the house soon after. Falcón locked up and watched Ignacio's silver Mercedes disappear into the heat. He went back to Consuelo, who opened the door with the
El Mundo
Sunday magazine hanging from her fingers. They went into the living room where they both collapsed on the sofa.

'How's Ignacio taking it?' she asked.

'Do you know Ignacio Ortega?'

'I've met him at Raúl's construction industry functions. I spent more time with his wife than I did with him. He's a rather uninteresting self-made man with not a grain of culture in him. Given Pablo's talent and intellectual capacity… you can barely believe they're brothers.'

'Do you know anything about his son?'

'I know his name is Salvador and that he's a heroin addict. He lives somewhere in Seville.'

'Ah, well, that's a little more than Ignacio was prepared to admit.'

'That's what you find out when you talk to the wife.'

'How is he with his wife?'

'He's not what you'd call a "new man". He's of the macho generation. The wife does what she's told,' said Consuelo. 'She was scared of him. If we were talking and he joined us, she'd shut up.'

'Anyway, it's Sunday,' said Falcón, waving it all away. 'Let's try and forget about it for the rest of the day.'

'Well, I'm glad you came back,' she said. 'I was about to fall into a Sunday depression. You stopped me reading about Russia. No, that's not quite true. I turned on the news to try to stop thinking about Russia and I found myself looking at the forest fire, which didn't help. The noise of it. I've never heard fire before, Javier. It was like a beast crashing through the woods.'

'The fire in the Sierra de Aracena?'

'It's destroyed 2,500 hectares and the wind is still blowing up there,' she said. 'The firefighters say it was arson. You wonder what the matter is with people.'

'Tell me about Russia. I'm interested in Russia.'

'It's more about statistics.'

'They're the worst thing about the news,' said Falcón. 'I think editors have a dictum: "If you haven't got a story, give them a statistic." They know that our imagination will do the rest.'

'These are the Russian statistics,' she said, reading. 'The number of illegitimate births doubled between 1970 and 1995. This meant that by 1997 twenty-five per cent of all births were illegitimate. Most of the illegitimate children were born to single mothers who couldn't keep themselves alive and look after a child at the same time, so they abandoned them. In December 2000 the Orthodox Church reckoned that there were between two and five million vagabond children in Russia.'

'Ah, right, your obsession with children,' said Falcón. 'Two to five million.'

'Now for the only good statistic. The fertility rate in Russia is nearly the lowest in the world. Nearly. And it was then that I realized why this article has been written in a Spanish newspaper because the only country with a fertility rate lower than Russia is

'Spain,' said Falcón.

'That's why your timing was perfect,' said Consuelo. 'I'd just started on that Sunday thinking, that the whole world has gone wrong.'

'I have a temporary solution to the world crisis.'

'Tell me.'

'Manzanilla. A swim. Paella. Rosado. And a long siesta that goes right through to Monday.'

He woke up in the night disturbed by a vivid dream. He was walking down a path in a dense wood. Coming towards him were two children, a boy and a girl, of around twelve years old who he knew were brother and sister. Walking between them was a totemic bird wearing a frightening mask. As they met, the bird explained: 'I need these two lives.' The look on the children's faces was one of unbearable dread and he felt himself powerless to help. He thought it had woken him up until, as he lay there, he realized that the television was on downstairs. Voices were speaking in American-English. Consuelo was still asleep next to him.

The light from the TV pulsated in the dark as he entered the living room. He turned it off with the remote. It felt warm and he noticed that the sliding door to the pool was open about half a metre.

He turned on the light. Consuelo came down the stairs still half asleep.

'What's going on?'

'The TV was on,' said Falcón. 'Did we leave that door open?'

Consuelo was suddenly awake, her eyes wide open. She pointed and let out a shout as if there was something bad in the room.

He followed her finger. Lying on the coffee table was a group photograph of her children. Someone had drawn a large red cross on the glass.

The news told him that the fire was still burning outside Almonaster la Real as Falcón made his way to the Jefatura. Fifty kilometre per hour winds were not making the firefighters' task any easier and they were having to let it burn rather than actively save the forest.

He went straight up to the office of his immediate boss, Comisario Elvira, whose secretary sent him in. Elvira sat at his desk. He was a small, neat man with a pencil moustache and black hair, which he kept in a side parting made with the same laser precision as the Prime Minister's. He was a completely different animal to his predecessor, Andres Lobo, who seemed to have a greater understanding of the primordial mire from which men came. Elvira was a man who kept his pencils straight.

Falcón gave a verbal report of his weekend's work and put in a request for some discreet police protection for Consuelo Jiménez's children, who were down at the coast near Marbella with her sister.

'Were you staying with Sra Jiménez last night?' asked Elvira.

Falcón faltered. Nothing was sacred in the Jefatura.

This has not been the first threat since the beginning of the Vega investigation,' said Falcón, evasive on that point. 'I met her for lunch on Saturday and she told me someone from the Jefatura had given her an envelope for me. This photograph was inside.'

Elvira drew the evidence bag towards him and inspected Nadia tied to the chair.

'This Ukrainian woman disappeared after helping us with our inquiries,' said Falcón.

'Anything else?'

'Day one a car with stolen plates followed me to my house. Day two I found a photograph of my ex-wife stuck on the board above my desk at home with a pin through her throat.'

'These Russians are people who seem to know your situation, Inspector Jefe,' said Elvira. 'What are you doing about these threats?'

'I think the design of the threats is to put pressure on me directly,' said Falcón. 'If there had been an initial threat which had been developed I would be more concerned, but each one has been different and specific to my situation. They are trying to distract me from my purpose and get me to refocus my attention away from the Vega inquiry.'

'So you're not tempted to reassign any of your resources?'

'If, by that, you mean will I take responsibility for maintaining the small resource at my disposal on the Vega case, then, yes, I will.'

'Just out of interest, have you eliminated Sra Jiménez from your inquiries?'

'We have no suspect, no witness and no motive.'

'And another thing… Pablo Ortega – I understand you took a psychologist there with the intention of trying to help his son. She also accompanied you to the prison. Is there any connection between this case and the Vegas' deaths?'

Silence. Falcón shifted in his chair.

'Inspector Jefe?'

'I don't know.'

'But you think there is… something?'

'It needs more work,' said Falcón, 'which means more time.'

'We have confidence in your abilities and we support you in your endeavours,' said Elvira, 'as long as you do nothing to discredit the force. I'll call the Jefatura in Malaga and arrange for an officer to keep an eye on Sra Jiménez's sister and the children.'

Falcón went back down to his office with one of Elvira's comments niggling in his mind. These Russians know your situation. They do. How do they know it?

'Did you find Pablo Ortega's mobile?' Falcón asked Cristina Ferrera, as he passed through to his office.

'I'm working on the numbers now,' she said. 'He seemed to have used his fixed line for incoming calls only. The mobile was his first choice for making calls.'

'I want to know who he spoke to in the hours before he died,' he said.

'What about the key found in Vega's freezer?' asked Ramírez.

'She can work on that afterwards,' said Falcón. 'What about Vega's ID?'

'It's taking time. They've gone as far back as they can with the computer. Now they're working through manually kept ledgers.'

'And the Argentinians?' asked Falcón, as he dialled Carlos Vázquez's number.

'They're short-staffed because of the holidays,' said Ramírez, coming into Falcón's office. 'They've sent the details back to Buenos Aires.'

Falcón showed him the photograph of Nadia Kouzmikheva. Ramírez beat the wall with the side of his fist.

'Somebody handed that in an envelope to Consuelo Jiménez in a bar. They asked her to give it to me,' Falcón said, and then held up a silencing finger. 'I've got a question about company cars in Vega Construcciones,' he said into the phone.

'There weren't any,' said Vázquez. 'Rafael had a policy of no company cars. Everybody used their own and claimed back their expenses.'

'But presumably there were some pool cars that the company personnel could use for jobs?'

'No. Vega Construcciones
used
to own lots of vehicles and equipment, but in the end they became too expensive to run. So, from a few years ago, Rafael cut everything back to just the basic equipment required, got rid of all the vehicles and started hiring whatever was needed. Site engineers, architects – everybody uses their own vehicles.'

'Did Sr Vega keep an old car himself for knocking around on the building sites?'

'Not that I know of.'

Falcón hung up.

'Consuelo Jiménez,' said Ramírez, grinning.

'Don't start, José Luis,' said Falcón, putting a call through to Vega Construcciones.

'Why is Cristina working on Pablo Ortega when we know what happened to him?' said Ramírez.

'Call it instinct,' said Falcón. 'What I want you to tell me is who, in the Jefatura, could be talking to the Russians about me?'

He asked for the building supervisor, who confirmed that no cars were kept in the car park other than those personally owned by employees, and that Sr Vega had only one car, which used to be a Mercedes but was now a Jaguar. He hung up and told Ramírez of the threats made to him so far in the investigation and Elvira's comment.

'Why does it have to be someone from the Jefatura? You've been followed from day one. Anybody could be tapping into your mobile calls. Everybody in Seville knows your story.'

Falcón and Ramírez started calling around the car parks in Seville asking if Rafael Vega or Emilio Cruz held an account with any of them. Half an hour later, the car park under the Hotel Plaza de Armas, on Calle Marqués de Paradas, confirmed that Rafael Vega had an annual account which he paid for in cash.

He set off with Ramírez, who retuned the radio away from the news and a series of interviews with locals talking about the forest fire burning outside Almonaster la Real. Alejandro Sanz's plaintive voice filled the car.

'Any news on your daughter, José Luis?' asked Falcón.

'It's going to take longer than they thought,' he said, and switched the subject. 'This car park is perfect for getting out of town quickly.'

'And nobody would see you,' said Falcón. 'Unless you got caught at the traffic lights on el Torneo.'

'So how did you find out about the car?'

'Consuelo saw him driving it once in town,' said Falcón. 'Do you know a lawyer called Ranz Costa?'

'He's not one of the regular criminal lawyers.'

'See if you can get a meeting with him for later this morning,' said Falcón. 'He's Pablo Ortega's lawyer.'

Ramírez punched the numbers into his mobile. Ranz Costa had an office back across the river in Triana. He said he could fit them in for five or ten minutes any time this morning.

They parked in Calle Marqués de Paradas, picked up some latex gloves and a sheaf of evidence bags and walked down the ramp into the basement car park. The supervisor took them to the car, which was an old blue Peugeot 505 diesel estate. The rear number plate was nearly invisible because of dust.

'He was using this off road,' said Ramírez, snapping on his gloves. 'Felipe can analyse this dust, can't he?'

'Do you keep a key for this?' Falcón asked the supervisor, who shook his head, chewing on a toothpick.

'You want to get in the car?' he asked.

'No,' said Ramírez, 'he wants to unlock your brain to see what that fluttering noise is.'

'He doesn't bite,' said Falcón, 'unless you move suddenly.'

The supervisor removed his very unimpressed face from Ramírez and whistled. Two boys appeared in shorts and trainers and nothing else. The supervisor told them to open the car. One produced a screwdriver and the other unbent a length of wire from his pocket. The kid with the screwdriver jammed it in the door and levered the corner open, the kid with the wire flipped the lock. It took two seconds.

'I like a bit of finesse,' said Ramírez, flexing his gloved hands. 'None of that skeleton-key shit.'