'My foot was sore for days,' he said, with sudden recall. 'I had a blister.'
'Why would Marisa put a cigarette lighter to your foot?'
'To wake me up. I was dead to the world.'
'There are more charming ways to wake your lover up than burning his foot with a cigarette lighter,' said Falcon. 'I think that she had to wake you up because the timing of your departure from her apartment was crucial.'
Calderon sank back into his chair, lit another cigarette and stared up into the light coming in through the high, barred window. He blinked as his eyes filled and he bit down on his bottom lip.
'You're helping me,' said Calderon. 'The irony's not lost on me, Javier.'
'You need different help to what I can give you,' said Falcon. 'Now, let's just go back to my original point from the transcript. Just one more thing about that night. The two versions you gave Zorrita about how you found Ines in the apartment.'
Calderon's brain snapped back into some pre-rehearsed groove and Falcon held up his hand.
'I'm not interested in the version you and your lawyer have prepared for court,' said Falcon. 'Remember, none of this is about your case. What I'm trying to do might help you, but the design is not to get you off the hook, it's for me to find my way in.'
'To what?'
'The conspiracy. Who planted that small Goma 2 Eco bomb in the basement mosque, which exploded on the 6th of June, detonating the hundred kilos of hexogen stored there, bringing down the apartment building and destroying the pre-school?'
'Javier Falcon keeps his promise to the people of Seville,' said Calderon, grunting.
'Nobody's forgotten that… least of all me.'
Calderon leaned across the table, looked up through the pupils of Falcon's eyes into the top of his cranium.
'Do I detect something of an obsession going on here?' he said. 'Personal crusades, Javier, are not advisable in police work. Every old people's home in Spain probably has a retired detective gaping from the windows, his mind still twisted around a missing girl, or a poor, bludgeoned boy. Don't go there. Nobody expects it of you.'
'People remind me of it all the time in the Jefatura and in the Palacio de Justicia,' said Falcon. 'And what's more, I expect it of myself.'
'See you in the loony bin, Javier. Save me a place by the window,' said Calderon, sitting back, inspecting the conical ember of his cigarette.
'We're not going to end up in the loony bin,' said Falcon.
'You're pretty keen to get me down on some shrink's couch,' said Calderon, dredging for lost confidence. 'And you know what I say? Fuck off, you and anybody else. Mind your own madness. You especially, Javier. It's been less than five years since your 'complete breakdown' – wasn't that what they called it? – and I can see you've been working hard. God knows how many times you went through the files on the bombing before you started combing Zorrita's reports, looking for the flaws in my case. You should get out more, Javier. Have you fucked that Consuelo yet?'
'Let's get back to what happened at around 4 a.m. on Thursday 8th June in your apartment in Calle San Vicente,' said Falcon, tapping his notebook. 'In one version you came in to see Ines standing at the sink and you were 'so happy to see her', and yet in the other version you were 'annoyed', there was some sort of hiatus, you woke up lying in the corridor and when you went back to the kitchen you found Ines dead on the floor.'
Calderon swallowed hard as he replayed that night in the darkness of his mind. He had done it so many times, more times than even the most obsessive director would have edited, and re-edited, a scene from a movie. It now played in short sequences, but in reverse. From that moment of intense guilt when, trapped in the patrolman's torch beam, he'd been discovered trying to throw Ines into the river, to that blissful, pre-lapsarian state when he'd got out of the cab, helped by the driver, and walked up the stairs to his apartment, with no other intention than to get into bed as quickly as possible. And that was the point he always seized on: he knew at that moment he did not have murder on his mind.
'There was no intent,' he said, out loud.
'Start from the beginning, Esteban.'
'Look, Javier, I've tried it every which way: forwards, backwards and inside out, but however hard I try there's always a gap,' said Calderon, lighting another cigarette from the stub of the last one. 'The cab driver opened the apartment door for me, two turns of the key. He left me there. I went into the apartment. I saw the light from the kitchen. I remember being annoyed – and I repeat, 'annoyed', not angry or murderous. I was just irritated that I might have to explain myself when all I wanted to do was crash out. So I remember that emotion very clearly, then nothing until I woke up on the floor in the corridor beyond the kitchen.'
'What do you think about Zorrita's theory, that people have blank moments about terrible things they have done?'
'I've come across it professionally. I don't doubt it. I've searched every corner of my mind…'
'So what was this about seeing Ines alive and being so happy?'
'My lawyer tells me that Freud had a term for that: 'wish fulfilment', he called it,' said Calderon. 'You want something to be true so badly that your mind invents it for you. I did not want Ines to be dead on the floor. We were not happy together, but I did not want her dead. I wanted her to be alive so badly that my mind substituted the reality with my most fervent wish. Both versions came out in the turmoil of that first interview with Zorrita.'
'You know that this is the crux of your case,' said Falcon. 'The flaws I've found are small. Marisa going through your pockets, getting the upper hand in the shouting match with Ines in the Murillo Gardens and burning your foot to wake you up. These things amount to nothing when put against your recorded statement, in which you say that you entered the double-locked apartment alone, saw Ines alive, blacked out and then found her dead. Your inner turmoil and all that wish-fulfilment crap is no match for those powerful facts.'
More concentrated smoking from Calderon. He scratched at his thinning hair and his left eye twitched.
'And why do you think Marisa is the key?'
'The worst possible thing that could have happened at that moment in our investigation into the bombing was to have our instructing judge, and our strongest performer in front of the media, arrested for the murder of his wife,' said Falcon. 'Losing you pretty well derailed the whole process. If your disgrace was planned, then Marisa was crucial to its execution.'
'I'll speak to her,' said Calderon, nodding, his face hardening.
'You won't,' said Falcon. 'We've stopped her visits. You're too desperate, Esteban. I don't want you to give anything away. What you've got to do is unlock your mind and see if you can find any detail that might help me. And it might be advisable to get a professional in to do that for you.'
'Ah!' said Calderon, getting it finally. 'The shrink.'
4
Puti Club, Estepona, Costa del Sol – Friday, 15th September 2006, 14.35 hrs
Leonid Revnik was still sitting at Vasili Lukyanov's desk in the club, but this time he was waiting for news from Viktor Belenki, his second-in-command. When Revnik had taken control of the Costa del Sol after the police had mounted Operation Wasp in 2005, he'd got Belenki to run the construction businesses through which they laundered most of the proceeds of their drugs and prostitution trade. Belenki had just the right veneer of the good-looking, successful businessman and he spoke fluent Spanish, too. The veneer, though, was only an expensive suit thick, as Viktor Belenki was a violent brute with access to a rage so incandescent that even Revnik's most psychopathic henchmen were afraid of him. Belenki could also be very friendly and extremely generous, especially if you jumped when he told you to. This meant that he had developed good contacts in the Guardia Civil, some of whom had thick wads of Belenki's euros hidden in their garages. Leonid Revnik was hoping that Belenki could tell him where the money and disks that Lukyanov had stolen from the puti club safe had ended up. He was on his third cigar of the day. The empty safe was still gaping. The air-con was on the blink and he was uncomfortably hot. The mobile on
