The Blind Man of Seville

‘I’m not sure he was a complete stranger. No. I’d seen him before. He probably owned a shop, which my mother used to buy from. It would be something like that.’

‘What happened in the judge’s office?’

He recounted the meeting: the attempted dialogue with Sergio, the Almodovar film, the terrible reply from Sergio and what it had done to him.

‘What shook me was the talk about outsiders beforehand and then the killer using a line from the book. I’m sure it’s L’Etranger. The Outsider. It makes me feel as if I’m going mad.’

‘Ignore it,’ she said. ‘Synchronicity. It happens all the time. Concentrate on the issues.’

‘Which are?’

Silence from Alicia Aguado.

‘My mother,’ he said. ‘That’s an issue.’

‘Why did the line from Camus have such a terrible effect on you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How did your mother die? Was she ill?’

‘No, no, she wasn’t ill. She had a heart attack but …’

A long silence in which Falcon blinked once a minute.

‘There was something … a crisis of some sort in the street. We were in the house, Paco, Manuela and I. And there was this big row in the street outside our house. I can’t remember what it was about. It was afterwards though, that my father came to tell us that our mother was dead. But it won’t come back to me … what happened.’

‘What happened after she died?’

‘There was a funeral. I only remember people’s legs from that day and the general gloom. It was February and raining. My father spent a lot of time with us. He nursed us all through it.’

‘Did you ever see the stranger on the beach again?’

‘Never.’

‘How long was it before your father married again?’

‘We already knew Mercedes,’ he said. ‘She’d been a family friend for a long time. She helped my father a lot, marketing his work in America. They were having an affair before my mother died … did I tell you that? I only just found out.’

‘Carry on.’

‘Mercedes was still married when my mother died and then her husband subsequently died in America. Cancer, I think. She came back to Tangier in her husband’s yacht. It must have been about a year after my mother died that they got married.’

‘Did you like Mercedes?’

‘I loved Mercedes from the moment I first saw her. I still have that vague memory of seeing her for the first time. I was tiny. She came to my father’s studio and picked me up. I think I played with her earrings. I loved her from that moment, but then my father always said I was a very loving child.’

‘What happened with Mercedes?’

‘It was a very good time. My father was successful. The Falcon nudes were the talk of the art world. He was being hailed as the new Picasso, which was ridiculous given the size and quality of his oeuvre. Then tragedy. It was after a New Year’s Eve dinner. Everybody went down to the yacht in the port afterwards to see the fireworks and then some of them went out on the boat at night and a storm got up. Mercedes fell overboard. They never found her body.

‘But … but just before the party left the house I crept down from my bedroom and Mercedes spotted me,’ he said, replaying it like film through the gate of his mind. ‘She took me back up to bed. I was reminded of this the other day because … That was it. It’s coming together. In my murder investigation the first victim, Raul Jimenez, smoked these cigarettes, Celtas, and that was the smell in her hair. I only just found out that my father knew Raul Jimenez from the forties and now I realize that he must have been at that party except … he’d already left Tangier by then.’

‘I’m sure other people smoked that brand in those days.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Falcon. ‘So, Mercedes took me up to bed and kissed me and hugged me tight to her bosom. She was squeezing her love into me so hard I could barely breathe. She was wearing perfume, which I now know is Chanel No.5. Women don’t use it so often these days. But years ago if I came across that smell in the street it would transport me back to that moment. Being in the grip of love.’

‘And after Mercedes left you?’

Falcon grabbed his stomach with his free hand, stricken with pain.

‘I hear …’ he said, struggling. ‘I hear her heels receding down the corridor and stairs. I hear the talk and the laughter of the other guests. I hear the door shutting. I hear the shoes pattering on the cobbles. And I remember that she never came back.’

Tears blurred his vision. Saliva filled his mouth. He couldn’t swallow. The last words came out from under the shuddering wall of his stomach.

‘There were no more mothers after that.’

Alicia made some tea. The cup burnt his fingers, the tea scalded his tongue. Physics brought him back into the room. He felt a strange newness, a cleansed satisfaction, as when he and Paco had scraped and rendered an old