The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

me, heaving open his own door like a man coming out of a tank.

'The thing about my father was that you never knew when he was acting. He could do anger and turn around and do love. But that afternoon there was no mistaking his rage. He caught up with me in the field by the road. He grabbed me by the hair and swung me around. He slapped me about the face and head, with the front and back of his massive hands, until I was a ragdoll. He pulled my face up to his and I saw his sweat and his teeth and his lips stretched white and the smell of his breath as he forced me to take back my words. He made me say to him that I had lied. He made me beg for his forgiveness. And when I did, he gave it to me and said that we would never speak about this day ever again.

'And we didn't. We never really spoke to each other again after that day'

'Do you think he talked to Ignacio about it?'

'I'm sure he didn't. I would have known about it. Ignacio would have come after me to frighten me back into silence.'

They sat quietly for a moment. Alicia weighed the enormity of that day in her mind. Falcon sat outside remembering the dream Pablo had told him and his subsequent collapse on the lawn. He could see the thoughts in Alicia's twitching unseeing eyes. Was this the right time? What should my next question be? What question will unlock the reasoning behind Sebastian's extreme action?

'Have you been thinking over the past few days why your father killed himself?' she asked.

'Yes, I have. I've thought very hard about his note to me,' said Sebastian. 'My father loved words. He loved to talk and write. He liked his own voice. He liked to be verbose. But in that letter he reduced himself to one line.'

Silence. Sebastian's head trembled on his neck.

'And what did that line mean to you?'

'It meant that he believed me.'

'And why do you think he'd come to that conclusion?'

'Before I was convicted, my father had reached a point in his life when he never questioned himself. Whether it was to do with his belief in his own brilliance, or the sycophants around him, I don't know. But he never thought that he might be wrong, or have made a mistake… Until I was arrested. Once they put me in here I refused to see him, so I can't be sure, but I think that was when doubt started to creep into his mind.'

'He had to leave the barrio,' said Alicia. 'He was ostracized.'

'They didn't much like him in the barrio. He thought they all loved him in the same way that all his audiences loved him, but he never bothered with any of them as individual people. They were just there for the further glorification of Pablo Ortega.'

That must have given him reason to doubt.'

'That, and the fact that his work was drying up gave him reason to start living in his own head more. And, as I know, if you do that you come across all sorts of doubts and fears, and they grow large in your loneliness. He probably spoke to Salvador, too. He wasn't a bad man, my father. He took pity on Salvador and helped him with money for his drugs. I doubt Salvador would have told him straight, because of the force of my father's personality and his own fear of Ignacio, but once there was doubt in his mind he might have started to pick up on things. And when they were added to his doubts he might have found the answer to that horrible equation in his head, which was the sum of all his fears. It must have been devastating for him.'

'But don't you think that this was an incredibly drastic action on your part – to put yourself in here?'

'You don't think I did this just to get my father's attention, do you?'

'I don't know why you did this, Sebastian.'

He took his wrist away from her and covered his head with his arms. He rocked to and fro on his chair for several minutes.

'Perhaps we've had enough for today,' she said, finding his shoulder.

He calmed down, disentangled himself. Held out his wrist again.

'I was scared of what I had growing in my own mind,' he said.

'Let's take this up tomorrow,' said Alicia Aguado.

'No, I'd like to try and get this out,' he said, putting her fingers to his wrist. 'I'd read somewhere… I couldn't help reading this sort of thing. The newspapers are full of stories of child abuse and my eyes used to close in on every story because I knew they were relevant to me. I extracted things from these stories which created doubt in me, and I began to find a corner of myself that I could no longer trust. It grew from there, until it became a certainty in my head. Only a matter of time before… before…'

'I think this is too much for you today, Sebastian,' she said. 'You're driving your mind too hard.'

'Please let me get this out,' he said. 'Just this one thing.'

'What did you extract from these stories?' said Alicia Aguado. 'Just tell me that.'

'Yes, yes, that was the beginning of it,' he said. 'What I saw in these stories that was relevant to me was that… the abused become abusers themselves. When I first read that I didn't think it could be possible… that I could end up with the same sly little look that Uncle Ignacio had when he sat on my bed at night. But when you're lonely, doubt creates more doubt, and I really began to think that it could be something that might happen to me. That I wouldn't be able to control it. Already, I found that kids liked me and I liked them. I loved to share in their innocence. I loved to be with them in their unconscious world. No past horrors, no future worries, just the glorious unravelling present. And the thought grew that eventually I might do something unspeakable, and I lived in constant fear of it. And then one day I couldn't bear it any longer and I thought that I would just do it. When the moment came, though… I couldn't, but it didn't matter any more because the fear inside me was already so great.

I let him go, Manolo, and while I waited for the police to come I found myself praying for them to put me in a cell and throw away the key.'

'But you couldn't do it, Sebastian,' she said. 'You didn't do it.'

'My fear was not telling me that. My fear was telling me that eventually it would happen.'

'But what did you feel when you faced the reality of your intention?'

'I felt nothing but revulsion. I felt that this would be a very wrong, unnatural and cruel thing to do.'

Falcon dropped Alicia back in Calle Vidrio and continued home. He went to his study with a bottle, and a glass full of ice. The whisky tasted good after the day he'd had. He sat in his study with his feet up on the desk, thinking about the man he'd been only twelve hours ago. He wasn't depressed, which surprised him. He felt oddly solid, connected and determined, and he realized that anger was holding him together. He wanted to get Consuelo back and he wanted to bury Ignacio Ortega.

Virgilio Guzman arrived punctually at 10 p.m. Falcon poured him a whisky and they sat in the study. After the morning's outburst, he'd expected Guzman to come in hard about the cover-up he'd smelt in the Jefatura, but he seemed more interested in talking about his holiday in Mallorca, which was coming up in a week's time.

'What's happened to the crusading journalist who stormed out of my office this morning?' asked Falcon.

'Drugs,' said Guzman. 'The whole reason I left Madrid was to come down here and lead a more relaxed lifestyle. I get a whiff of that story and I go mad. My blood pressure went through the roof. Now I'm on tranquillizers and, you know, life's really quite nice when it comes to you filtered.'

'Does that mean you're dropping the story?'

'Doctor's orders.'

They sat in silence while Falcon tested that for veracity.

'Did someone talk to you, Virgilio?'

'It's a very close-knit community down here,' said Guzman. 'The paper's not going to run with it unless somebody else cracks it open first. And you know something, Javier? I don't give a shit. That's drugs for you.'

'How about giving me some advice, as an impartial observer?'

'Don't make me drink too much whisky,' he said. 'It doesn't mix with the drugs.'

Falcon told him everything about the cover-up: the Montes finca, the dead bodies up in the sierra, the arsonists, the tape – both the original and the copy upstairs. Guzman listened and nodded throughout as if this was stuff that came to his ears every day.

'What do you want from all this?' said Guzman. 'What's your minimum requirement?'

'To put Ignacio Ortega away for a very long time.'

'That's understandable. He sounds like a very nasty piece of work.'

'Do you think I'm being too narrow-minded?' said Falcon. 'Should I be gunning for our hallowed