I’ll tell you. Raul Jimenez pursued me relentlessly. He cornered me, pressured me and begged me. He broke me down until I said “Yes”. And having spent months avoiding that word, in fact saying “No, no, no”, once I’d said it … it untangled me.’
‘What was there to untangle?’
‘I imagine you’ve known disappointment,’ she said. ‘When your wife left you, for instance. How old was she, by the way?’
‘Thirty-two,’ he said, no longer resisting her digressions.
‘And you?’
‘Forty-four then.’
She sat in the leather scoop chair, crossed her legs and swivelled from side to side.
‘As you’ve probably gathered, I’m not a Sevillana,’ she said. ‘I’ve lived with them for more than fifteen years but I’m not one of them. I’m a Madrilena. In fact I come from a
‘In 1984 I was working in an art gallery and I fell in love with one of the clients, the son of a duke. I won’t bore you with details … only that I became pregnant. He told me we couldn’t marry and he paid for me to go to London for an abortion. We separated at the Barajas Airport and the only time I’ve seen him since is in the pages of
‘You made it sound as if he was crazy about you. You’ve had three children by him. You seem to enjoy your work. Your choice in finally accepting him must have, as you said yourself, simplified things.’
She went to the desk, ripped through the drawers until she came to a pile of old creamy-coloured black-and- white photographs which she shuffled through rapidly, choosing one, which she held to her chest.
‘It did,’ she said, ‘until I saw this —’
She handed him the photograph. Falcon looked from the photograph to her and back again.
‘If it wasn’t for the mole on her top lip you wouldn’t be able to tell us apart, would you, Inspector Jefe?’ she said. ‘Apparently she was also a little shorter than me.’
‘Who is she?’
‘Raul’s first wife,’ she said. ‘Now you see, Inspector Jefe, once a Consuelo always a Consuelo.’
‘And what happened to her?’
‘She committed suicide in 1967. She was thirty-five years old.’
‘Any reason?’
‘Raul said she was clinically depressed. It was her third attempt. She threw herself into the Guadalquivir — not off a bridge, just from the bank, which has always struck me as a strange thing to do,’ she said. ‘Not snuffing yourself out with sleeping pills, not savagely punishing yourself with slashed wrists, not diving into oblivion for all to see, but throwing yourself away.’
‘Like rubbish.’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s it,’ she said. ‘Raul didn’t tell me any of that, by the way. It was an old friend of his from the Tangier days.’
‘I was brought up in Tangier,’ said Falcon, his brain unable to resist another non-coincidence. ‘What was your husband’s friend’s name?’
‘I don’t remember. It was ten years ago and there’ve been far too many names since then, you know, working in the restaurant business.’
‘Did your husband have any children from that marriage?’
‘Yes. Two. A boy and a girl. They’re in their fifties now or close to it. The daughter, yes, that’s interesting. About a year after we got married a letter came here from a place called San Juan de Dios.’
‘That’s a mental institution on the outskirts of Madrid in Ciempozuelos.’
‘As any Madrileno would know,’ she said. ‘But when I asked Raul about it he invented some ridiculous story until I confronted him with a direct debit to the same institution and he had to tell me that his daughter’s been an inmate there for more than thirty years.’
‘And the son?’
‘I never met him. Raul wouldn’t be drawn on the subject. It was closed. A past chapter. They didn’t speak. I don’t even know where he lives, but I suppose I’ll have to find out now.’
‘Do you have a name?’
‘Jose Manuef Jimenez.’
‘And the mother’s maiden name?’
‘Bautista, yes, and she had a strange first name: Gumersinda.’
‘The children were both born in Tangier?’
‘They must have been.’
‘I’ll run it through the computer.’
‘Of course you will,’ she said.
