The Silent and the Damned (44 page)

'No, Comisario,' said Falcón. 'It's just a way of terminating a line of inquiry. If Sr Krugman was a fantasist, we'll never hear from Mark Flowers again. But if he was supplying information there will be some anxious people in the consulate. I'd be interested to hear if you receive communication from a higher authority.'

Elvira's phone rang. Falcón got up to leave. Elvira stayed him with his hand. The Comisario listened, made notes and hung up.

'That was a senior officer from Aracena,' he said. 'He's just been informed by the fire department that the forest fire raging around Almonaster la Real in the past few days was an arson attack, and that they have now traced the start of the fire to an isolated finca which belonged to Inspector Jefe Alberto Montes. The contents of the house have been almost completely destroyed, but they have found a rudimentary timer, which they believed was attached to an incendiary device that ignited a large quantity of petrol.'

It was still brutally hot outside the city, which crouched in a haze behind Falcón like a beast in its own fetor, but the openness of the rolling plain ahead of him, the swaying brown grasses, the distant hills, made him feel free of the discomfort of his own body. The temperature dropped as he drove through the sierra and, although it never reached below blood heat, the sense of release from the city's feverish concrete into the high greenery of the chestnut trees induced a mild delirium. Or was it Elton John singing 'Benny and the Jets' on the radio?

It was impossible to think that anything terrible could happen out here. Whereas the city drew the poor, the lost, the corrupted and the depraved to the mangled teat of its bristly underbelly, this country seemed untouched. The jostling leaves of the trees filtered the sunlight to the pure, dappled memory of less confused times. Until Falcón turned off the main road to Almonaster la Real.

The charcoal stink of torched forest reached him before the sight of blackened stumps and scorched, defoliated trees with their bark-flayed arms stretched out in the distress of serious burn victims. The forest floor of black-and-grey coals still smouldered, as if panting from the devastating consumption. The white sky provided a pitiless backdrop, as if to emphasize to those doubters who passed through this monochromatic horror that what had happened here was as wrong as war.

The police and firemen he met in the local bar in Almonaster were grim and the townspeople shocked and in despair, as if they were the survivors of some wartime atrocity. They knew things that Falcón, as yet, didn't.

He was led down to the finca, which was several kilometres outside the town and isolated in the forest. There was a kilometre of rough dirt track up to the house, whose windowless, roofless, blackened shell looked like a giant, stoved-in human skull.

Everything wooden in the house had been consumed. The first floor no longer existed. It had burnt or collapsed under the weight of the falling roof on to the concrete below. The ground floor was piled with black terracotta roof tiles, charred beams and furniture, smoking mattresses, screenless televisions and pools of molten, but now hardened, plastic.

They took him down through the concrete floor into the basement, which was badly scorched but intact. It didn't look like any basement he'd ever seen. There were four metal doors, two on either side of a short corridor. The doors had bolts on the outside, which could also be padlocked. None of the rooms had windows. All had burnt wooden pallets and mattresses. They were cells in which people had been kept.

In one of the cells, whose walls were unplastered, revealing the original stone, there was some writing scratched on to a rock in the corner by the bed. It was in Cyrillic script. An enamelled metal plate lay upside down on the floor.

They led him back upstairs and out on to the land whose grass had been burnt off, leaving a bald stretch of black and brown beaten earth, which now looked like the hide of a diseased dog. At the edge of the land, inside what would have been the tree line, were two piles of earth.

'With the forest burnt down we could see these two humps,' said the officer. 'We dug down about a metre and found these -'

Falcón looked down on the skeletal remains of two people nestled in the dark earth.

'We didn't want to dig further until we had proper forensics here, but the local doctor measured them and thinks that they are a boy and a girl of around twelve or thirteen years of age. He thought that they'd been buried for between eight months and a year, given that there is no tissue left.'

'What do you know about how this house was being used?' asked Falcón, needing to get something out, because his rage was reaching uncontainable levels.

'Weekends only and not every weekend. Friday and Saturday nights, mostly.'

'Did you ever meet the owner?'

'Inspector Jefe Montes? Of course. He came and said hello to us. He said he'd bought the house and that some friends were going to do it up and use it as a hunting lodge.'

They walked back to the house and Falcón could see that there were air-conditioning units for the lower and upper floors.

'So they came in the summer as well?' said Falcón, pointing at the blackened boxes.

'Not to hunt, obviously,' said the officer. 'In the end, they didn't do much hunting at all… We didn't think I much about it at the time. And, because Inspector Jefe Montes was the owner, we didn't think anything…'

The officer's voice trailed off. 'Illegal' seemed an ineffective word to describe what had gone on in this house of horror.

'Whoever started this fire had to bring a great deal of petrol up to the house,' said Falcón. 'They probably used plastic jerry cans and they'd have needed a pickup. Can you contact every petrol station in this area and… well, you know what to do.'

Falcón called Elvira and gave him a report. He asked for Felipe and Jorge to be sent out with a change of clothes, because they were certainly going to have to spend the night. He also asked for some manpower to phone around the petrol stations in the Seville area, looking for a pick-up with probably two people who'd filled possibly ten plastic jerry cans with petrol, late Saturday night or very early on Sunday morning. He hung up and told the officer that the area was to be cordoned off and kept under guard. Nobody was to touch anything on the property until the forensics arrived. He checked the air-conditioning boxes on the ground floor but didn't find what he was looking for. He asked for a set of ladders. A car was dispatched to town. Falcón stood in the blackened landscape and drew fury from the destruction.

The car returned with a set of ladders. Falcón leaned them up against the house and found himself mentally praying. He took out an evidence bag and a pair of tweezers and climbed up to the air-conditioning units, one by one. On the third unit he found what he wanted – scorched, but not destroyed, was the peeling sticker of the company that had installed the units: Aire Condicionado Central de Sevilla. Ignacio Ortega's company.

He took out another evidence bag and walked down the rough track and scooped up some dust. He expected it to match the dust found on Vega's old Peugeot.

Ortega. Vega. Montes, he thought. And only one left alive.

Ramírez was bored as he took Falcón's call on his mobile. There were thousands of Maddy Krugman's prints on paper and on hard disk, and the task did not inspire him. His boredom evaporated as Falcón briefed him on Montes's finca near Almonaster la Real.

'Did you check Ignacio Ortega's alibi?' asked Falcón.

'Yes, but that was for the night that Rafael Vega died.'

'Where was he?'

'He was in bed with his wife on the coast.'

'I told him about Pablo's death late on Saturday night and he didn't come back to Seville until Sunday morning.'

'I can ask him for proof of his whereabouts for that week if you want?'

'I don't want to spook him.'

'Well, if he organized that arson attack you already have,' said Ramírez. 'How many people know what happened at Montes's finca?'

'By now the whole of Almonaster la Real. I mean not in detail, but they know it's nasty. They'll probably know about the bodies.'

'So that's all going to be on the news this evening.'

'We haven't got enough on him to link him to what was actually happening at Montes's finca. We'll have to find the arsonists first and they might give us the link,' said Falcón. 'Leave Cristina at the Krugmans' house and go back to the Jefatura and make it all
happen, José Luis.'

Falcón went back down into the basement of the house and, with a pen torch in his mouth, copied down
the Cyrillic script written on the wall. As he looked around the four cells he realized that the mattresses had all been doused with petrol and set alight, but that there hadn't been enough oxygen to keep them going.

More people were dispatched to town to bring large plastic sheets, which they laid out on the scorched earth. The mattresses and pallets were numbered off and lifted out of the basement and laid on the plastic. Falcón conducted a minute search of the walls of the empty cells.

In the second cell he noticed a dark stain on the floor, coming from the back wall out into the centre of the room. He chipped out a piece of concrete and bagged it. In the fourth cell he found a one-euro coin behind a loose piece of mortar. He bagged that.

Outside they started work on the mattresses, peeling back the outer fabric and working through the stuffing. The mattress from cell two had a shard of curved glass in it, a section of a broken wine goblet. The mattress from cell three had the real treasure: a used Gillette II razor blade, still with some bristles attached.

At 3 p.m. they broke for lunch. Felipe and Jorge had arrived in Almonaster la Real and, over pork chops, chips and salad, Falcón told them to concentrate on the interior of the house before they moved on to exhuming the bodies.

'Square metre by square metre. Photographs all the way. Dust everything for prints, even if they look completely burnt out – all televisions, video recorders, remotes. There's a lot of congealed plastic in there, which might be from videos; see if there's one centimetre of tape available. We're also looking for personal items – money, jewellery, clothing. People come to a place like this, they lose things. I want a finger search of all the land around the house. Be meticulous, do everything by the book. Nobody, and I mean nobody, who has been to this house and been involved with what's been going on here should have the slightest chance of being able to get away with it on a technicality.'

A grim determination settled over the lunch table. Calls were made to the neighbouring towns of Cortegana and Aracena for more people to help with the finger search of the land. By the time they returned to the finca there were thirty people. Falcón put twenty-six on to the finger search and four to help Felipe and Jorge lifting things out of the house.

All findings were photographed in situ, logged in a school exercise book with the photograph number and bagged. Any large items with discernible prints were wrapped in plastic. Falcón asked Elvira to have two lab technicians standing by to receive the material and process the evidence.

By 7 p.m. they had completed the finger search of the land and about two-thirds of the house interior. Ramírez called.

'I've found your arsonists,' he said. 'I'm putting a squad together to go and pick them up now. They live out in Tres Mil Vivendas and I don't want them getting away from us in that little hell hole.'

'That was quick work, José Luis.'

'I got lucky,' he said. 'I reckoned they'd be doing this at night, so I started with all the late-night garages on the road out to Aracena. I thought they might not be stupid but, in this heat, they could easily be lazy. I reckoned they wouldn't fill all the jerry cans up at one petrol station and draw attention to themselves, but they might want to do it on the way. Two of the garages remembered a pick-up with two guys filling plastic jerry cans, but neither of them had close-circuit television. I worked back from there until I found a petrol station with CCTV, and this was where I got lucky. The guys came back twice to fill up. I went out there to view the tapes. Both guys were wearing hats, so they knew they were vulnerable to CCTV, and I didn't get a sight of them or the vehicle because it was parked on the other side of the pumps. But the second time there was a truck parked where they wanted to be, so they had to come into the light between the shop and the pumps. The CCTV cameras were pointed so that they picked up the activity on that part of the forecourt. Their registration number just slid beautifully into view.'

'Have you got names?'

'Yes, and they've both got police records for petty theft and burglary, and one of them picked up an assault conviction too, but neither of them has been done for arson.'

'I'm on my way back with the first vanload of evidence.'

He closed down the mobile, which rang again instantly. Alicia Aguado told him she could find a friend to take her out to the prison for her next session with Sebastián Ortega.

One of the Aracena police officers with a relative in Seville volunteered to accompany the vanload of evidence. Falcón headed back to the city alone at speed, as if he was rushing towards a brilliant conclusion. He had to pull over to take three calls on the way back.

The first was from Cristina Ferrera, saying that she'd been through Maddy Krugman's prints and hard disk and come across two shots of Marty Krugman sitting with a different stranger in each. In one he was animated and talking, in the other he seemed to be waiting. In both shots he was either in the background or off to one side. The one in which he appeared in the background had been taken from the hard disk and she'd had to blow up that section of the shot to confirm it was him.

The second call was from Ramírez, confirming that they'd arrested the two arsonists and he was conducting a search of their apartment.