The Hidden Assassins

‘Did you tell her you’d fallen in love with this woman?’

‘We never talked about it.’

‘And what now…four years later?’

‘I feel nothing for Inés,’ said Calderón, which was not quite the whole truth. He did feel something for her. He hated her. He could hardly bear to share her bed, had to steel himself to her touch, and he couldn’t understand why. He had no idea where it came from. She hadn’t changed. She had been both good to him and for him after the Maddy incident. This feeling of dying he had when he was with her in bed was a symptom. Of what, he could not say.

‘Well, Esteban, you’re a member of a very large club.’

‘Have you ever been married?’

‘You are joking,’ said Marisa. ‘I watched the soap opera of my parents’ marriage for fifteen years. That was enough to warn me off that particular bourgeois institution.’

‘And what are you doing with me?’ asked Calderón, fishing for something, but not sure what. ‘It doesn’t get more bourgeois than having an affair with a state judge.’

‘Being bourgeois is a state of mind,’ she said. ‘What you do means nothing to me. It has no bearing on us. We’re having an affair and it will carry on until it burns out. But I’m not going to get married and you already are.’

‘You said I was the last person in the world who should be married,’ said Calderón.

‘People get married if they want to have kids and fit into society, or, if they’re suckers, they marry their dream.’

‘I didn’t marry my dream,’ said Calderón. ‘I married everybody else’s dream. I was the brilliant young judge, Inés was the brilliant and beautiful young prosecutor. We were the “golden couple”, as seen on TV.’

‘You don’t have any children,’ said Marisa. ‘Get divorced.’

‘It’s not so easy.’

‘Why not? It’s taken you four years to find out that you’re incompatible,’ said Marisa. ‘Get out now while you’re still young.’

‘You’ve had a lot of lovers.’

‘I might have been to bed with a lot of men but I’ve only had four lovers.’

‘And how do you define a lover?’ asked Calderón, still fishing.

‘Someone I love and who loves me.’

‘Sounds simple.’

‘It can be…as long as you don’t let life fuck it up.’

The question burned inside Calderón. Did she love him? But almost as soon as it came into his mind he had to ask himself whether he loved her. They cancelled each other out. He’d been fucking her for nine months. That wasn’t quite fair, or was it? Marisa could hear his brain working. She recognized the sound. Men always assumed their brains were silent rather than grinding away like sabotaged machinery.

‘So now you’re going to tell me,’ said Marisa, ‘that you can’t get a divorce for all those bourgeois reasons—career, status, social acceptance, property and money.’

That was it, thought Calderón, his face going slack in the dark. That was precisely why he couldn’t get a divorce. He would lose everything. He had only just scraped his career back together again after the Maddy debacle. Being related to the Magistrado Juez Decano de Sevilla had helped, but so had his marriage to Inés. If he divorced her now his career might easily drift, his friends would slip away, he would lose his apartment and he would be poorer. Inés would make sure of all that.

‘There is, of course, a bourgeois solution to that,’ said Marisa.

‘What?’ said Calderón, turning to look at her between her upturned nipples, suddenly hopeful.

‘You could murder her,’ she said, throwing open her hands, easy peasy.

Calderón smiled at first, not quite registering what she had said. His smile turned into a grin and then he laughed. As he laughed his head bounced on Marisa’s taut stomach and it bounced higher and higher as her muscles tightened with laughter. He sat up spluttering at the brilliant absurdity of her idea.

‘Me, the leading Juez de Instrucción in Seville, killing his wife?’

‘Ask her ex-husband for some advice,’ said Marisa, her stomach still contracting with laughter. ‘He should know how to commit the perfect murder.’

4 (#ulink_8d2ce5d2-71ba-5e07-851d-afbb40c42958)

Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 05.30 hrs

Manuela Falcón was in bed, but not sleeping. It was 5.30 in the morning. She had the bedside light on, knees up, flicking through Vogue but not reading, not even looking at the pictures. She had too much on her mind: her property portfolio, the money she owed to the banks, the mortgage repayments, the lack of rental income, the lawyer’s fees, the two deeds due to be signed this morning, which would release her capital into beautifully fluid funds of cash.

‘For God’s sake, relax,’ said Angel, waking up in bed next to her, still groggy with sleep and nursing a small cognac-induced hangover. ‘What are you so anxious about?’

‘I can’t believe you’ve asked that question,’ said Manuela. ‘The deeds, this morning?’

Angel Zarrías blinked into his pillow. He’d forgotten.

‘Look, my darling,’ he said, rolling over, ‘you know that nothing happens, even if you think about it all the time. It only happens…’

‘Yes, I know, Angel, it only happens when it happens. But even you can understand that there’s uncertainty before it happens.’

‘But if you don’t sleep and you churn it over in your head in an endless washing cycle it has no effect on the outcome, so you might as well forget about it. Handle the horror if it happens, but don’t torture yourself with the theory of it.’

Manuela flicked through the pages of Vogue even more viciously, but she felt better. Angel could do that to her. He was older. He had authority. He had experience.

‘It’s all right for you,’ she said, gently, ‘you don’t owe six hundred thousand euros to the bank.’

‘But I also don’t own nearly two million euros’ worth of property.’

‘I own one million eight hundred thousand euros’ worth of property. I owe six hundred thousand to the bank. The lawyer’s fees are…Forget it. Let’s not talk about numbers. They make me sick. Nothing has any value until it’s sold.’

‘Which is what you’re about to do,’ said Angel, in his most solid, reinforced concrete voice.

‘Anything can happen,’ she said, turning a page so viciously she tore it.

‘But it tends not to.’

‘The market’s nervous.’

‘Which is why you’re selling. Nobody’s going to withdraw in the next eight hours,’ he said, struggling to sit up in bed. ‘Most people would kill to be in your position.’

‘With two empty properties, no rent and four thousand a month going out?’

‘Well, clearly I’m looking at it from a more advantageous perspective.’