The Blind Man of Seville

‘Heliopolis.’

‘Another expensive place to live,’ said Falcón. ‘He has four of the most well-known restaurants in Seville attended by the rich, the powerful and the celebrated. And yet … Celtas, which he smoked with the filters broken off. And yet … cheap prostitutes picked up in the Alameda.’

‘That was only a recent development. No more than two years … since … since Viagra became available. He was impotent for three years before that.’

‘His taste in tobacco probably goes back to a time when he had no money. When was that?’

‘I don’t know, he never talked about it.’

‘Where does he come from?’

‘He never talked about that either,’ she said. ‘We Spanish don’t have such a glorious past that his generation would choose to wallow in it.’

‘What do you know about his parents?’

‘That they’re both dead.’

Consuelo Jiménez was no longer maintaining eye contact. Her ice-blue eyes roved the room.

‘When did you and Raúl Jiménez meet?’

‘At the Feria de Abril in 1989. I was invited to his caseta by a mutual friend. He danced a very good Sevillana … not the usual shuffling about that you see from the men. He had it in him. We made a very good pair.’

‘You would have been in your early thirties? And he was in his sixties.’

She smoked hard and trashed the cigarette. She walked to the window where she became a dark silhouette against the bright blue sky. She folded her arms.

‘I knew this would happen,’ she said, mouth up against the cold glass. ‘The digging. The turning over. That’s why I wanted something from you first. I didn’t want to spew my life into the police machine, the one that encapsulates lives on a few sides of A4, the one that doesn’t have space for nuance or ambiguity, that doesn’t see grey but only black or white and really only has an eye for black.’

She turned. He shifted in his seat, trying to get the light to catch her face. He turned on the desk lamp and began a reappraisal of Consuelo Jiménez in this warmer light. Perhaps the initial toughness she’d shown was what she’d learned from being with and working for Raúl Jiménez. The dress, the jewellery, the fingernails, the hair — maybe that was how Raúl Jiménez wanted her and she wore it like armour.

‘My job is to get to the truth,’ he said. ‘I’ve been working at it for over twenty years. In that time I … and police science, have developed hundreds of techniques for helping us get to the provable truth. I’d like to be able to tell you it is now an exact science, that it is actually scientific, but I can’t, because, like economics, another so-called science, there are people involved and where people are involved there’s variability, unpredictability, ambivalence … Does that answer your concern, Doña Consuelo?’

‘Maybe after all your job is not so different from your father’s.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘You were asking me about my husband. How we met. Our age disparity.’

‘It just struck me as unusual that an attractive woman in her thirties should …’

‘Go for an old toad like Raúl,’ she finished. ‘I’m sure I could think up something suitable about the emotional and economic stability of the mature man, but I think we’ve come to an agreement, haven’t we, Inspector Jefe? So I’ll tell you. Raúl Jiménez pursued me relentlessly. He cornered me, pressured me and begged me. He broke me down until I said “Yes”. And having spent months avoiding that word, in fact saying “No, no, no”, once I’d said it … it untangled me.’

‘What was there to untangle?’

‘I imagine you’ve known disappointment,’ she said. ‘When your wife left you, for instance. How old was she, by the way?’

‘Thirty-two,’ he said, no longer resisting her digressions.

‘And you?’

‘Forty-four then.’

She sat in the leather scoop chair, crossed her legs and swivelled from side to side.

‘As you’ve probably gathered, I’m not a Sevillana,’ she said. ‘I’ve lived with them for more than fifteen years but I’m not one of them. I’m a Madrileña. In fact I come from a pueblo in Extremadura, just south of Plasencia. My parents left there when I was two. I was brought up in Madrid.

‘In 1984 I was working in an art gallery and I fell in love with one of the clients, the son of a duke. I won’t bore you with details … only that I became pregnant. He told me we couldn’t marry and he paid for me to go to London for an abortion. We separated at the Barajas Airport and the only time I’ve seen him since is in the pages of Hola! I moved to Seville in 1985. I’d been here on holiday. I liked the city’s alegría. Four years later and not much alegría, it has to be said, I met Raúl. I was ready for Raúl. Disappointment had prepared me.’

‘You made it sound as if he was crazy about you. You’ve had three children by him. You seem to enjoy your work. Your choice in finally accepting him must have, as you said yourself, simplified things.’

She went to the desk, ripped through the drawers until she came to a pile of old creamy-coloured black-and-white photographs which she shuffled through rapidly, choosing one, which she held to her chest.

‘It did,’ she said, ‘until I saw this —’

She handed him the photograph. Falcón looked from the photograph to her and back again.

‘If it wasn’t for the mole on her top lip you wouldn’t be able to tell us apart, would you, Inspector Jefe?’ she said. ‘Apparently she was also a little shorter than me.’

‘Who is she?’

‘Raúl’s first wife,’ she said. ‘Now you see, Inspector Jefe, once a Consuelo always a Consuelo.’

‘And what happened to her?’

‘She committed suicide in 1967. She was thirty-five years old.’

‘Any reason?’

‘Raúl said she was clinically depressed. It was her third attempt. She threw herself into the Guadalquivir — not off a bridge, just from the bank, which has always struck me as a strange thing to do,’ she said. ‘Not snuffing yourself out with sleeping pills, not savagely punishing yourself with slashed wrists, not diving into oblivion for all to see, but throwing yourself away.’

‘Like rubbish.’

‘Yes, I suppose that’s it,’ she said. ‘Raúl didn’t tell me any of that, by the way. It was an old friend of his from the Tangier days.’

‘I was brought up in Tangier,’ said Falcón, his brain unable to resist another non-coincidence. ‘What was your husband’s friend’s name?’

‘I don’t remember. It was ten years ago and there’ve been far too many names since then, you know, working in the restaurant business.’

‘Did your husband have any children from that marriage?’

‘Yes. Two. A boy and a girl. They’re in their fifties now or close to it. The daughter, yes, that’s interesting. About a year after we got married a letter came here from a place called San Juan de Dios.’

‘That’s a mental institution on the outskirts of Madrid in Ciempozuelos.’

‘As any Madrileño would know,’ she said. ‘But when I asked Raúl about it he invented some ridiculous story until I confronted him with a direct debit to the same institution and he had to tell me that his daughter’s been an inmate there for more than thirty years.’

‘And the son?’