The Blind Man of Seville

She sat down straight in the chair, knees pressed together like a good little girl. She leaned forward, grasping her shins, holding herself in.

‘I can’t think,’ she said. ‘I can’t think of anything like that.’

‘Nor can I,’ said Falcon.

She drew on the cigarette, spat out the smoke as if it was disgusting. Falcon searched for any hint of pretence.

‘I can’t think,’ she said it again.

‘You have to think, Dona Consuelo, because you have to go over every minute that you spent with Raul Jimenez plus everything you know about his life before you met him and you must tell it all … to me and then perhaps between us we can find the small crack … the …’

‘The small crack?’

Falcon’s mind went blank. What crack was he talking about? An opening. A chink. But into what?

‘We might find something that will give us an insight,’ he said. ‘Yes, an insight.’

‘Into what?’

‘Into what your husband feared,’ said Falcon, losing his thread.

‘He had nothing to fear. There was nothing frightening in his life.’

Falcon reined in his thoughts. His fear? What was he thinking of? What was this man’s fear going to tell him?

‘Your husband had certain … tastes,’ said Falcon, fingering the pack of Celtas. ‘Here we are in one of the most prestigious apartment buildings in Seville, or at least they were fifteen years ago …’

‘Which was about when he bought it,’ she said. ‘I never liked it here.’

‘And where were you moving to?’

‘Heliopolis.’

‘Another expensive place to live,’ said Falcon. ‘He has four of the most well-known restaurants in Seville attended by the rich, the powerful and the celebrated. And yet … Celtas, which he smoked with the filters broken off. And yet … cheap prostitutes picked up in the Alameda.’

‘That was only a recent development. No more than two years … since … since Viagra became available. He was impotent for three years before that.’

‘His taste in tobacco probably goes back to a time when he had no money. When was that?’

‘I don’t know, he never talked about it.’

‘Where does he come from?’

‘He never talked about that either,’ she said. ‘We Spanish don’t have such a glorious past that his generation would choose to wallow in it.’

‘What do you know about his parents?’

‘That they’re both dead.’

Consuelo Jimenez was no longer maintaining eye contact. Her ice-blue eyes roved the room.

‘When did you and Raul Jimenez meet?’

‘At the Feria de Abril in 1989. I was invited to his caseta by a mutual friend. He danced a very good Sevillana … not the usual shuffling about that you see from the men. He had it in him. We made a very good pair.’

‘You would have been in your early thirties? And he was in his sixties.’

She smoked hard and trashed the cigarette. She walked to the window where she became a dark silhouette against the bright blue sky. She folded her arms.

‘I knew this would happen,’ she said, mouth up against the cold glass. ‘The digging. The turning over. That’s why I wanted something from you first. I didn’t want to spew my life into the police machine, the one that encapsulates lives on a few sides of A4, the one that doesn’t have space for nuance or ambiguity, that doesn’t see grey but only black or white and really only has an eye for black.’

She turned. He shifted in his seat, trying to get the light to catch her face. He turned on the desk lamp and began a reappraisal of Consuelo Jimenez in this warmer light. Perhaps the initial toughness she’d shown was what she’d learned from being with and working for Raul Jimenez. The dress, the jewellery, the fingernails, the hair — maybe that was how Raul Jimenez wanted her and she wore it like armour.

‘My job is to get to the truth,’ he said. ‘I’ve been working at it for over twenty years. In that time I … and police science, have developed hundreds of techniques for helping us get to the provable truth. I’d like to be able to tell you it is now an exact science, that it is actually scientific, but I can’t, because, like economics, another so-called science, there are people involved and where people are involved there’s variability, unpredictability, ambivalence … Does that answer your concern, Dona Consuelo?’

‘Maybe after all your job is not so different from your father’s.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘You were asking me about my husband. How we met. Our age disparity.’

‘It just struck me as unusual that an attractive woman in her thirties should …’

‘Go for an old toad like Raul,’ she finished. ‘I’m sure I could think up something suitable about the emotional and economic stability of the mature man, but I think we’ve come to an agreement, haven’t we, Inspector Jefe? So