The Blind Man of Seville

‘I was touched he cared so much about the children.’

Ramírez called him on his mobile. He’d finished with the removals men. It had taken some time to break them down, but they’d finally admitted that they went for lunch leaving the lifting gear in place because they had one more chest of drawers to bring down. They’d said that the gear wouldn’t work without the truck engine running, but the platform went up on rails, which was as good as a ladder. Once they’d brought the chest of drawers down nobody went back into the apartment. Falcón told him to join Fernández viewing the CCTV tapes with the conserje and hung up.

‘I’d like to talk about Basilio Lucena,’ he said.

‘There’s nothing to tell.’

‘Did you have any plans?’

‘Plans?’

‘Your husband was an old man. Didn’t it occur to you …?’

‘No, it didn’t … ever. Basilio and I have a nice time together. It involves some sex, of course, but it is not a great passion. We don’t love each other.’

‘I was thinking back to that duke’s son you mentioned earlier.’

‘That was different,’ she said. ‘I have no intention of developing my relationship with Basilio. In fact, I think this might even finish it.’

‘Really?’

‘I should have thought that you, with a famous father, would know how the eyes of society will come down on me. There will be talk and malicious thinking not dissimilar to the suspicions that you are paid by the state to have. It will all be idle … but vicious, and I will protect my children from that.’

‘Is it you or your husband who has the enemies?’

‘I am perceived as undeserving, as a rider on my husband’s coat-tails, as someone who would have failed in life were it not for Raúl Jiménez. But they will see,’ she said, her jaw muscle tensing in her cheek. ‘They will see.’

‘Were you aware of the contents of your husband’s will?’

‘I never saw him sign one, but I knew of his intentions,’ she said. ‘Everything would be left to me and the children and there would be some provision made for his daughter, his hermandad and his favourite charity.’

‘What was that?’

‘Nuevo Futuro, and the particular part of it that interested him was Los Niños de la Calle.’

‘Street children?’

‘Why not?’

‘People support charities for reasons. A wife dies of cancer, the husband puts money into cancer research.’

‘He said that he began contributing after a trip to Central America. He was very moved by the plight of children orphaned by the civil wars in those countries.’

‘Perhaps he himself was orphaned by the Civil War.’

She shrugged. Falcón’s pen hovered over his notebook where the word putas was underscored.

‘And the prostitutes?’ he said, punching the word out into the room. ‘You haven’t seen the section of the video where your husband is filmed frequenting the Alameda. He could have afforded better in less dangerous surroundings. Why do you think …?’

‘Don’t ask me why men go to prostitutes,’ she said, and, as an afterthought, ‘… his misery, I should think.’

‘And you can’t shed any light on that.’

‘People will only talk about those things if they want to, if they know how to. Something that could make my husband that wretched was probably buried so deep that he didn’t know it was there any more. It was just his condition. How would you start talking about something like that?’

Consuelo Jiménez’s words induced a trance in Falcón. His mind tumbled back over those first hours of the investigation and he hit that fear again, the surge of panic. He was on the walk down the corridor, the double walk, because it was his and the killer’s same strides towards that blank wall with its empty hook lit by the light from the horror room. Then the face, and the eyes in the face, and the terrifying relentlessness of what they’d seen.

‘Don Javier,’ she said, which snapped him back to reality because she hadn’t used his rank.

‘Please excuse me,’ he said. ‘I was lost. I mean I was elsewhere.’

‘It didn’t look like somewhere I would want to be,’ she said.

‘I was just running over some things in my mind.’

Then you must have seen some terrible things. You said yourself, about Raúl’s murder, the most extraordinary of your career.’

‘Yes, I did say that, but this wasn’t anything to do with that,’ he said, and found himself on the brink of a confession, which was not, he thought, a place the Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homicidios should ever be.

4 (#ulink_5888924a-859f-57fb-a21c-83e11958f636)

Thursday, 12th April 2001, Edificio Presidente, Los Remedios, Seville

He offered her a car. She turned him down and said she’d make her own way to her sister’s house. He asked for her sister’s details just to keep the pressure on, and reminded her that he would pick her up later to go to the Instituto Anatómico Forense for the identification of the body. He wanted to interview her then, once she’d been shocked out of any residual complacency by the sight of her husband’s dead body. He asked her to think about anything unusual in Raúl’s business or personal life in the last year and told her to call the restaurant to get the names and addresses of the three people who’d been fired for feeding her husband against orders. He knew they would be dead leads, but he wanted to induce a fear in her of his thoroughness. They shook hands at the door of the apartment; his were damp, hers dry and cool.

Ramírez followed him back into Raúl Jiménez’s study from the hall.

‘Did she do it,’ he asked, slumping into the high-backed chair, ‘or have it done, Inspector Jefe?’

Falcón turned his pen over and over in his fingers.

‘Any news from Pérez at the hospital?’ he asked.

‘The maid’s still out cold.’

‘And the CCTV tapes?’

‘Four people unidentified by the conserje. Two males. Two females. One of the females I would say is the whore, but she looks very young. Fernández has taken the tapes down to the station and we’ll get some digitalized printouts to show around the building.’

‘What about people leaving the building by alternative exits? The garage, for instance.’

‘Neither of those cameras are working. The conserje called the technicians this morning but they still haven’t arrived. Semana Santa, Inspector Jefe,’ he explained.

Falcón gave him the names and addresses of the fired employees and told him to have them interviewed as soon as possible. Ramírez left. Falcón picked up the photograph of Raúl Jiménez’s first wife — Gumersinda Bautista. He called the Jefatura and asked them to run a check on José Manuel Jiménez Bautista, born in Tangier in the late 1940s, early 1950s.

He sat back with the other photographs, flicked through the nameless people. He came across a shot of Raúl Jiménez on the deck of a yacht. He was barely recognizable. No hint of the toadiness to come. He was handsome and confident and stood as if he knew it, hands on hips, shoulders braced, chest puffed out. Falcón brushed his thumb over that chest, thinking there was a speck on the photograph. It stayed and on closer inspection looked to be some kind of wound to his right pectoral near the armpit. He flipped it over — Tangier, July 1953 was written on the back.

His mobile rang. The police computer had come up with a Madrid address and telephone number for José Manuel Jiménez. He took them down and asked after Serrano and Baena, two other officers from his group. They were off for Semana Santa. He ordered them to be sent down to him at the Jiménez apartment.