The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

with the taint of a bad olive.

'Congratulations, Esteban,' he said.

'We told our families last night,' said Calderon. 'You're the first outsider to know.'

'You'll make each other very happy,' said Falcon. 'I know.'

They nodded to each other and disengaged.

'I'll get back to the Medico Forense,' said the judge and left the room.

Falcon went to the window, took out his mobile and thumbed up Alicia Aguado's number from the address book. She was the clinical psychologist he'd been seeing for more than a year. His thumb stroked the call button and a flash of anger helped him to resist pressing it. This could wait until their regular weekly appointment the following evening. They'd covered his ex-wife Ines a million times over and she would just chastise him again for not moving on.

Javier and Ines had settled their differences. It had been a part of the rebuilding process after the Francisco Falcon scandal had broken fifteen months ago.

Francisco was the world-famous artist whom Javier had always believed to be his father, but who had been revealed as a fraud, a murderer and not his real father after all. Ines had forgiven Javier even before they'd arranged to meet some months after the media frenzy. It had been his coldness, captured by her terrible rhyming mantra, Tu no tienes corazon, Javier Falcon. 'You have no heart, Javier Falcon', that had finished their short marriage. Given his family history it was now clear to her why he should have been deficient in this fundamental human way. Over the last few months of his therapy thoughts of her had subsided, but whenever her name came up there was an unmistakable leap in his stomach. Her terrible accusation still mangled his mind and, in forgiving him she'd become, in his unstable state, someone to whom he had to prove himself.

And now this. Still, Ines had been seeing the judge for nearly a year and a half. They were the new golden couple not just of the Seville legal system, but of Seville society as well. Their marriage was an inevitability, which didn't made the news any easier to bear.

Vazquez appeared on his shoulder in the reflection of the glass. Falcon switched back into professional mode.

'How surprised are you to find your client dead under these strange circumstances, Sr Vazquez?' he asked.

'Very,' he said.

'Where's the licence for his gun, by the way?'

That's his private affair. This is his house. I'm only his lawyer.'

'But he entrusted you with the keys to his home.'

'He has no family here. When they went away for the summer they often took Lucia's parents, as well. There is someone in my office all the time. It seemed…'

'What about the Americans next door?'

'They've been here barely a year,' said Vazquez. 'He rents that house to them. The husband works for him as an architect. He didn't like people to get too involved in his life. He gave them my telephone number in case of emergencies.'

'Is Vega Construcciones his only company?'

'Let's say he's in the property business. He builds and rents out apartments and offices. He constructs industrial property to order. He buys and sells land. He has a number of estate agencies.'

Falcon sat on the edge of the desk, his foot swinging.

'This gun, Sr Vazquez, is not for discouraging burglars. It's a gun for stopping a man dead. Even if you clipped a man on the shoulder with a 9 mm bullet from a Heckler 8- Koch you'd probably kill him.'

'If you were a rich man who wanted to protect his family and home, would you go out and buy a toy or a serious piece of weaponry?'

'So, as far as you know, Sr Vega is not involved in anything criminal or borderline illegal.'

'Not that I know of.'

'And you can think of no reason why anybody would want to kill him?'

'Look, Inspector Jefe, I'm involved with the legal aspects of my clients' businesses. I rarely get involved in their personal lives unless it has an impact on their business. I know about his company. If he was doing anything else then he was not employing me as his lawyer. If he was having an affair with another man's wife, which I doubt, I wouldn't have known about it.'

'So what is your reading of this crime scene, Sr Vazquez? Sra Vega upstairs, suffocated by a pillow. Sr Vega downstairs, dead with a litre of drain cleaner by his side. While their son, Mario, is in the hands of a neighbour for the night.'

Silence. The brown eyes steadied on Falcon's chest.

'It looks like suicide.'

'At least one of those deaths has to be a murder.'

'It looks like Rafael killed his wife and then himself.'

'Did you ever see any evidence of that level of instability in your late client?'

'How's anybody supposed to know what goes on inside a man's head?'

'So, he wasn't looking at business failure or financial ruin?'

'You'd have to speak to the accountant about that, although the accountant was not the finance director. His knowledge would probably be confined.'

'Who was the finance director?'

'Rafael kept things close to his chest.'

Falcon gave him his notebook. Vazquez wrote down the accountant's name, Francisco Dourado, and his details…

'Is there any scandal brewing that you know of, involving Sr Vega or his company?' asked Falcon.

'Now I know you,' said Sr Vazquez, smiling for the first time with astonishingly perfect teeth. 'Falcon. I didn't make the connection before. Well… you 're still here, Inspector Jefe, and my client hasn't gone through anything like you did.'

'But I didn't commit any crime, Sr Vazquez. I wasn't facing moral ruin or personal shame.'

'Shame,' said the lawyer. 'Do you think shame still has that sort of power in our modern world?'

'It depends on the society in which you have built your life. How important its opinion is to you,' said Falcon. 'By the way, do you hold Sr Vega's will?'

'Yes, I do.'

'Who is the next of kin?'

'As I said, he has no family.'

'And his wife?'

'She has a sister in Madrid. Her parents live here in Seville.'

'We'll need someone to identify the bodies.'

Perez appeared in the doorway.

'They've pulled the note out of Sr Vega's hand,' he said.

They went to the kitchen, squeezing past the forensics who were crowding the corridor with their cases, waiting to get on to the crime scene.

The note was already in a plastic evidence bag. Calderon handed it over, eyebrows raised. Falcon and Vazquez frowned as they read it, and not just because its ten words were written in English.

'… the thin air you breathe from 9/11 until the end…'

Chapter 2

Wednesday, 24th July 2002

'Do these words mean anything to you?' asked Calderon.

'Nothing at all,' said Vazquez. 'Does the handwriting look normal to you?' 'It's definitely Sr Vega's… that's all I