‘He was a businessman is all I know,’ said Falcon, getting up from his chair.
‘You’re leaving?’ she asked.
‘Our business is done.’
She leaned across the desk and looked up at him with her ice-blue eyes.
‘You know, when this is all over, Don Javier, you and I should have dinner.’
‘You might be disappointed,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘We’d never be able to recreate the tantalizing dynamic of you being a prime suspect in a murder case and me being the investigating officer.’
She laughed — throaty, unrestrained, sexy.
‘There was one other thing,’ he said as he reached the door. ‘We’d like to have a look at your phone records both business and domestic over the last two years. Can you make those available to us?’
Their eyes met and locked. She shook her head, smiled and picked up the phone.
22
Falcon paced the floor outside Calderon’s office. He’d called him after his meeting with Consuelo Jimenez and they’d agreed to meet at six. It was already seven o’clock and the passing secretaries had given up on sympathetic glances. He was glad he wasn’t being made to wait by a fiscal in their offices above the Palacio de Justicia in the building next door, where he would have been tormented by all those people who knew him through Ines. It would have brought back those winter evenings when he’d picked her up from work and found himself at the centre of her bustling world. Her beauty attracted the excitement of fame. He was her lover. The chosen one. People had looked at him with searching eyes and broad smiles, wanting to know his secret. What has Javier Falcon got? Had he imagined all that? The way women had sniffed the air as he went by, and men had glanced over the urinal walls.
Pacing the floor outside Calderon’s office it suddenly hit him that it had all been about sex. He’d been caught up, not just in his own desire, but everybody else’s, too. He’d mistaken it, as had Ines. They’d thought it was the real thing, but it wasn’t. A fleeting physical attraction had been hijacked by everybody’s need for romantic wish fulfilment. What should have been a few months of mad sex had been turned into a shotgun wedding — except it wasn’t the father with the weapon. It was sentiment.
Dr Spinola, the Magistrado Juez Decano de Sevilla, came out of Calderon’s office. He stopped to shake hands with Falcon and seemed on the brink of some intrusive questioning but gave up on the idea. Calderon called him into the office, apologized for keeping him waiting.
‘Dr Spinola’s not an easy man to throw out,’ said Falcon.
Calderon wasn’t listening. He searched the inside of his head, reached for a cigarette, lit it and inhaled deeply.
‘That’s the first time he’s ever come to any of our offices to discuss a specific case,’ he said, to the wall above Falcon’s head. ‘Normally I go to him and give him an overview.’
‘What’s he so concerned about?’
‘Good question,’ said Calderon. ‘I’m confused.’
‘If it’s to do with our case, maybe I can help,’ said Falcon.
In a fraction of a second Calderon weighed up the situation. Stripping his problem down to instinct he looked at Falcon, thinking: ‘Can this man be trusted?’ He decided no, but only just. If they’d had a few more moments like the one in the cemetery, Falcon thought that Calderon would have confided in him.
‘What have you got for me, Inspector Jefe?’ he asked. ‘No Inspector Ramirez today?’
Falcon had arrived without Ramirez because he wanted to develop a personal relationship with Calderon and at the same time cut back Ramirez’s access to information, force him out of the wider picture and into smaller parts of the puzzle. Now he’d changed his mind again. Seeing Dr Spinola had made him cautious. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to have the name Carvajal floating about the corridors of the Edificio de los Juzgados. There was no logic to this other than the tenuous link of Spinola being in Jimenez’s celebrity photographs, along with Leon and Bellido, and Carvajal being on the MCA Consultores payroll. Leaking this in vague form to Consuelo Jimenez had been a calculated risk. First he’d wanted to see if she knew about it, which hadn’t been conclusive and he was sure that she would only see it as a way of taking the heat off herself. If Falcon made this more official via Juez Calderon there could be unknown repercussions. The leak could find its way back to Comisario Leon. The only problem now was that he had nothing to talk to Calderon about, except the one thing he was anxious to avoid.
‘You had an idea before we were sidetracked by Sergio’s text message,’ said Falcon.
‘Sergio?’
‘Our name for the killer. It was the one he used with Eloisa Gomez,’ said Falcon. ‘You remember, we were going to contact him, point up his mistakes and try to rile him into making more fatal ones.’
‘He left her mobile on the body,’ said Calderon.
‘But he still has Raul Jimenez’s.’
‘Do we know anything more about Sergio since he acquired a name?’
‘Eloisa Gomez and her sister talked about him as a type. They described him as
‘A foreigner?’
‘Forastero to them describes a mental state. He is someone who sees and understands things beyond the
