The Ignorance of Blood

The traffic opened up. Falcón moved on, put a call through to his second-in-command, Inspector José Luis Ramírez, whose usual stolid pugnacity had given way to a mixture of anger and excitement after viewing the disks they'd found in Vasili Lukyanov's briefcase.

‘You won't believe this shit,’ he said. ‘A councillor with two girls at the same time. A town planner giving it to a teenager in the ass. A building inspector snorting cocaine off a black girl's tits. And that's the mild stuff. This will crack the Costa del Sol wide open, if it gets out.’

‘Don't let it. You know the rules. Only one computer in our department –’

‘Relax, Javier. It's all under control.’

‘I'm not coming back in today,’ said Falcón. ‘Am I going to see you tomorrow?’

‘Elvira's out. It's quiet here. I'll be here in the morning and I'll stay if you want me to, but I'd rather not.’

‘Let's see how it goes,’ said Falcón. ‘I hope you can have a nice weekend.’

‘Hold on a sec, the GRECO guy, Vicente Cortés, was in here earlier looking for you. He wanted to tell you that he's had a report about a Russian who was found up in the hills behind San Pedro de Alcántara, with a nine-millimetre bullet in the back of his head. Alexei Somebody. A big friend of the guy you found on the motorway with a steel rod through his heart. Mean anything?’

‘More to Cortés than to me,’ said Falcón, and hung up.

At the Santa Justa station, Falcón found that the next AVE to Madrid was at 16.30, which would put him there just in time for his meeting with Inspector Jefe Zorrita. He called Yacoub on a phone in the station, trying to work out when he could get back to Seville and whether it would still be possible to make it to Consuelo's for dinner. Wanting that. Needing that. Even though progress was slow.

‘See Zorrita,’ said Yacoub. ‘I'll let you know where to go afterwards.’

Falcón ate something unmemorable, drank a beer, sunk a café solo and boarded the train. He wanted to sleep but there was too much brain interference. A woman sitting opposite him was talking to her daughter on her mobile. She was getting remarried and her daughter wasn't happy about it. Complicated lives, getting more complicated by the minute.

The prison governor called to say that Esteban Calderón had put in a request to see a psychologist.

The train slashed through the brown, parched plains of northern Andalucía.

Where had the rain gone?

‘He won't see the prison psychologist,’ said the governor. ‘He talks about this woman you know, but he can't remember her name.’

‘Alicia Aguado,’ said Falcón.

‘You're not the investigating officer in Señor Calderón's case, are you?’

‘No, but I'm seeing the officer who is this evening. I'll make sure he contacts you.’

He hung up. The woman opposite had finished speaking to her daughter. She spun the mobile on the table with a long, painted nail. She looked up. The sort of woman who always knows when she's under observation. Dangerous, save-my-life eyes, thought Falcón. The daughter was right to be concerned.

Up since before three and still not even lethargic. He closed his eyes to the dangerous ones opposite, but never reached below that confused state on the edge of oblivion. Now that he was worried he might not see her this evening, Consuelo surfaced in his mind. They'd first met five years ago when she'd been the prime suspect in the murder of her husband, the restaurateur Raúl Jiménez. A year later they'd met again and had a fling. Falcón had been hurt when she broke it off, but, as he'd recently discovered, Consuelo had had her own problems, which had sent her to the consulting rooms of the blind clinical psychologist, Alicia Aguado. Now, for the last three months, they'd been trying again. He could tell she was happier. She was easing him into her life gradually: only seeing him at weekends and quite often in family situations, with her sister and the children. He didn't mind that. His work had been punishing. Consuelo, too, was expanding the restaurant business left to her by Raúl Jiménez. Falcón enjoyed the feeling of belonging that he got from sitting at her family table. He wouldn't have minded more sex, but the food was always good, and in their moments alone they were getting on.

Thoughts of Consuelo always seemed to involve Yacoub. The two were inextricably linked in his mind. The one had led to the other. Falcón and Consuelo had first been drawn together by their fascination with the fate of Raúl Jiménez's youngest son from his first marriage, Arturo, who'd vanished in the mid 1960s never to be seen again. The boy had been kidnapped by a Moroccan businessman as an act of revenge against Raúl Jiménez, who had impregnated the businessman's twelve-year-old daughter and then fled back to Spain. After his brief affair with Consuelo, Falcón had set out to find Arturo, hoping that this would bring her back to him. It hadn't worked, but the reward had been to discover that Arturo had been brought up as one of the Moroccan businessman's sons and had even been given his family name to become Yacoub Diouri.

Their strange pasts: Falcón, who had been raised in Spain by Francisco Falcón only to find that his real father was a Moroccan artist, and Yacoub, born a Spaniard, forsaken by his father Raúl Jiménez, to be raised by his Moroccan abductor in Rabat, had been the bizarre foundation of their powerful friendship. And for the first time, perhaps as a result of his exhausted state, Falcón found his mildly confused mind reflecting, within the emotional compression of these unusual events, on what had happened to the child of the twelve-year-old daughter who'd been impregnated by Raúl Jiménez. He must ask Yacoub.

His mobile vibrating against his chest brought him back with a start to the dusty fields flashing past. It was his police mobile and he took the call without checking the name on the screen.

‘Listen, Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón. Keep your nose out of things that don't concern you.’

‘Who is this?’

‘You heard.’

The line went dead. He checked the number. Withheld. He folded the phone away. The woman opposite was looking at him again. Across the aisle they were watching him, too. Paranoia, that horribly infectious disease, closed in. The voice on the mobile. Had there been an accent? How had they got his police number? Something a little more uncomfortable than satisfaction eased between his shoulder blades as he realized that, in putting pressure on Marisa Moreno, he must be on the right track. He'd been dredging his mind for something to talk about to Inspector Jefe Zorrita. He didn't want to annoy him with a bunch of hairline cracks in his cast-iron case. Now things were firming up in his mind.

The train eased into the Atocha station. Falcón hadn't arrived in Madrid on the AVE for some years and as he came into the main concourse he was distracted by the continuing memorial to the victims of the 11 March 2004 bombings. He was standing there, looking at the flowers and candles, when the woman from the train appeared by his side. This was too much, he thought.

‘Forgive me, now I know it must be you,’ she said. ‘You are Javier Falcón, aren't you? May I shake your hand and tell you how much I admire you for what you said on the television, about catching the perpetrators of the Seville bomb. Now I've seen you in the flesh, I know you won't let us down.’

He held out his hand, almost in a trance, thanked her. She smiled and brushed past him and in that moment he found that his other hand now contained a piece of folded paper. He wasn't sure who'd put it there, but he was sensible enough not to look at it. He left the station, picked up a cab to the Jefatura. The folded note gave an address just off the Plaza de la Paja in the Latina district and instructions to enter via the garage.

Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita welcomed him into his office. He was wearing a dark blue suit, a red tie and a white shirt in a way that hinted that minus the tie was about as informal as he ever got. He had his black hair combed back in rails to reveal a forehead with three lines drawn to a focal point above the bridge of his nose. It struck Falcón that there was no mistaking him for anything other than a cop. His hardness had been added in layers; the lacquer of experience. A meeting of the eyes, a handshake, dispelled any possibility that this person was a civil servant or businessman. He had seen it all, heard it all, and his whole family structure and belief system had kept him powerfully sane.

‘You look tired, Javier,’ he said, falling back into his chair. ‘It never stops, does it?’

They looked out of the window at the bright, sunlit world that kept them so fully employed. Falcón's eyes shifted back to the desk where there was a photo of Zorrita with his wife and three children.

‘I didn't want to do this over the phone,’ said Falcón. ‘I have enormous respect for the work you did last June under very difficult circumstances…’

‘What have you found?’ asked Zorrita, cutting through the preliminaries, interested to hear what he could possibly have missed.

‘As yet … nothing.’

Zorrita sat back, hands clasped over his flat, hard stomach. Not so concerned now that he knew he wasn't going to have to confront a failing on his part.

‘My interest in this case is not to get a wife-beater and suspected murderer off the hook,’ said Falcón.

‘That man is a cabrón,’ said Zorrita with profound distaste from behind his family photograph. ‘A nasty, arrogant… cabrón.’

‘He's beginning to recognize that himself,’ said Falcón.

‘I'll believe that when I see it,’ said Zorrita, who was a man incapable of complications in his love life, because there'd only ever been one woman in it.

‘The prison governor just called me to say that he's volunteered to see a shrink.’

‘No amount of talking, no amount of disentangling the shit that went on between him and his parents, no amount of “light” shed on “feelings”, will take away the fact that he beat that poor woman and then killed her and, if he's given half a chance, like all those other weak brutes, he'll do it again.’

‘This isn't what I've come to talk to you about today,’ said Falcón, seeing that this was something that stoked Zorrita up. ‘Would you mind if I laid out the basic problem I've got? Some of it you'll know, but other parts of it will be news to you.’

‘Go ahead,’ said Zorrita, still simmering.

‘As you know, the destruction of the pre-school and apartment block by the Seville bomb of 6th June, three months ago, came about as a result of the detonation, by a smaller device, of approximately one hundred kilos of hexogen. This high explosive was being stored by a logistics cell of the Moroccan terrorist group, the GICM, in the basement mosque of the building. The smaller device was comprised of Goma 2 Eco, the same explosive used in the 11th March bombings here in Madrid back in 2004. Prior to the explosion, the mosque was cased by two men masquerading as council inspectors, who, we believe, inserted some device in the fuse box, which blew and caused a power failure. These men have not been found, nor have the electricians who were brought in to repair the fuse box, restore power and do some other work, during which we believe they planted the Goma 2 Eco device in the false ceiling of the mosque.

‘The idea of the so-called Catholic conspiracy was to use this outrage to blame Islamic extremists, to make it look as if they had a plan to return Andalucía to the Muslim fold. The conspirators wanted to turn public opinion in favour of a small right-wing party called Fuerza Andalucía, who, in becoming the new partner of the ruling Partido Popular, would put the conspirators in control of the Andalucían state parliament. It didn't work and the alleged masterminds of the plot – César Benito, a board director of Horizonte, and Lucrecio Arenas, the ex-CEO of Banco Omni, who were Horizonte's bankers – were executed a few days after the bombing.’

‘What about the Islamic calling cards left near their bodies?’ asked Zorrita.

‘Nobody thinks that those killings were carried out by any radical Islamist group,’ said Falcón. ‘It's believed they were terminated by their co-conspirators.’