The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

'I thought that what we had going between us was a good thing. It felt right,' said Falcon, the emotion rising in his throat. 'For the first time in my life, it felt absolutely right.'

'It is a good thing, but it is not what I want now.'

'You want to devote yourself to your children?'

'That's part of it,' she said. 'The rest is me. We have a good thing going now, but it will change. And I don't want the intensity, the complications, the responsibility… But most of all, and this is my failing, I do not want the daily confrontation with my weakness.'

'Your weakness?'

'I have weaknesses. Nobody sees them but they are there,' she said. 'This is my big weakness. You know everything about me, every terrible thing because our relationship started in the terrible arena of a murder investigation. But you don't know this: I am hopeless in love and I cannot bear it.'

'How do you know, if you've only had the illusion of it before?'

'Because it's already started,' she said.

She stood up, the tuna untouched, the sauce congealing on the plate. She came round to his side of the table. He tried to say things. He wanted to talk her out of it. She put her fingers on his lips. She held his face, ran her hand over his hair and kissed him. He felt the wetness of her tears. She pulled back, squeezed his shoulder once and left.

The door slammed. He looked at his plate. There was nothing that could get past what he had growing in his throat. He scraped the tuna into the bin, looked at the brown smear left on the plate and then he hurled it against the wall.

Chapter 30

Wednesday, 31st July 2002

Strange siesta sleep left Falcon feeling oddly rested but with his brain sitting awkwardly in his head, like a breech birth. The morning's events drifted in his mind slow as river mist. It had been so disastrous that a hysterical positivism staged a small rampage in his head. He sat on the edge of the bed, shaking his head, dredging for laughs, and an idea came to him, which propelled him into the shower where it grew, clearing his mind.

He drove to San Bernardo, hitting the steering wheel at odd intervals, thinking that it wasn't finished between him and Consuelo. She wasn't going to drift away from him that easily. There was still some talking to be done, some persuading. He went up to see Carlos Vazquez and caught sight of himself in the lift mirror: there was a mad determination in him.

'I'd like to speak to the Russians,' said Falcon, walking into Vazquez's office. 'Do you think you could arrange that for me?'

'I doubt it.'

'Why not?'

'They wouldn't have anything to say to you… Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homicidios.'

'You could invite them over – you know, something to do with their projects – and I could join you for the meeting.'

'That would not be possible.'

'Charm them, Sr Vazquez.'

'Vega Construcciones are no longer actively involved in their projects. They have no reason to come and see me,' said Vazquez. 'They sold the buildings.'

'They sold them?'

'They were theirs to sell.'

'Don't you think, Sr Vazquez, given their intricate involvement with your late client, that it would have been judicious to have informed us?'

'I was told not to inform anybody except the third party in the sale.'

'But you didn't think that we deserved some notification?'

'Under normal circumstances I would have told you,' said Vazquez, hands clasped, knuckles white.

'And what was so abnormal about these circumstances?'

Vazquez opened his desk drawer and took out an envelope.

'I bought my children a dog last Christmas. A puppy. They took it down to the coast with them for the holidays,' said Vazquez. 'They called me at the end of last week to say the dog had disappeared. They were all in tears. On Monday morning I received a package sent from Marbella which contained a dog's paw and this envelope.'

Falcon shook out the contents: a single photo of Vazquez's family sitting on the beach looking happy. On the reverse side was a note – 'They're next.'

'What do you think of that for psychology Inspector Jefe?'

Falcon drove to the Jefatura. It occurred to him that since Sunday there had been no more threats from the Russians and now he knew why. They'd accomplished what they set out to do. They'd extricated themselves from the Vega projects and his investigation was now officially over. And their most criminal action had been the slaying of a children's pet.

Ramirez and Ferrera sat in the office, wordless.

'What's going on?' asked Falcon. 'Shouldn't you be down in the lab with Felipe and Jorge?'

'They've been told to work behind closed doors and to only discuss their findings with Comisario Elvira,' said Ramirez.

'What about the razor blade I sent down there?'

'They're not allowed to talk to us about anything.'

'And the arsonists?'

'They're still with us,' said Ramirez. 'We don't know for how much longer. In your absence I called Elvira to ask if we should get them to write their statements. He told me to do nothing. And I'm an expert at that. So, here we are, doing fuck all.'

'Any calls?'

'Lobo wants to see you, and Alicia Aguado wants to know if you're going to be able to take her to the prison this evening.'

'It's not over yet, Jose Luis,' said Falcon.

He took the lift up to Lobo's office on the top floor. He called Alicia Aguado and arranged to pick her up. He wasn't kept waiting by Lobo, who was now calm. They sat and looked at each other as if there was some disastrous battle plan laid out between them, which had resulted in the deaths of thousands.

'The detective work by you and your squad has been excellent,' said Lobo, which flattery Falcon took to be a bad sign.

'You think so?' said Falcon. 'To me it's been a remarkable catalogue of failures. I have no killer for Vega and a landscape littered with dead bodies.'

'You've cracked a major paedophile network.'

'I don't think I cracked it, exactly. Ignacio Ortega has been ahead of me all the way, as is proven by the fact that I have nothing on him, other than his installation of the air-conditioning units in the finca, and the late Alberto Montes has been tripping me up with his every action,' said Falcon. 'Now Ortega is laughing in my face and the Russians are still out there, free as birds, to continue their trafficking of adults and children for sexual purposes.'

'Ignacio Ortega is finished. He's a marked man. Nobody will go anywhere near him.'

'Applause,' said Falcon. 'He's still living in his comfortable house, running his successful business. He'll keep his head down for a few years and then, because of the nature of his particular obsession, he'll be back. That sort of person has a compulsion to desecrate innocence and it's no less strong than the serial killer's compulsion to feel fresh bodies struggling for life in his hands. And, I don't need to tell you, Comisario, that Ignacio Ortega is just one little link that we've managed to temporarily cut. The big monster, the Russian mafia, is still out there, spreading its