Falcon let the photocopied sheets fall from his lap. They scattered on the floor. He was mesmerized by his thoughts, the confirmation that the killer had access to his father’s diaries and now, with the additional information from El Zurdo, he realized that it must have been one of the art students his father had taken on to relieve his loneliness.
The Bellas Artes would be closed. El Zurdo was uncontactable. He went through his father’s address book and found the name of somebody at the university with a home telephone number. He called but there was no answer.
His thoughts turned to Raul Jimenez and the revelation that had broken his friendship with his father. He thought it unlikely that his father would let that pass without comment in the journals, but it had taken place on a date after the final entry in which his father had announced his total ennui.
Javier shunted back his chair, ran up the stairs. He slowed to a walk around the gallery and stopped outside the studio. He stared into the black pupil of the fountain on the patio. An apparently disparate thought had come to him. One of the insoluble elements of the case was what Sergio had shown Raul Jimenez. Where had he got his images? Salgado’s horrors had been easy enough to solve. They’d found the trunk in the attic and the necessary images and soundtrack, but with Raul Jimenez they’d never succeeded. Despite endless inquiries at Mudanzas Triana there’d been no evidence that any of Jimenez’s long-term storage had been touched.
He pushed himself away from the wall of the gallery and went into his father’s studio. He found the last journal in the storeroom. And there it was, some ten pages after what he’d thought was the final entry.
The entry told the story he’d heard from El Zurdo and finished with the line:
Falcon leafed through the empty pages to the end. He went back to the last entry and read it again. Ciempozuelos stuck in his mind. Sergio would have known everything from this entry — the whole family tragedy — and there was an opening for him: Marta in Ciempozuelos. But Marta could barely speak. Falcon replayed his last visit there. Marta’s wound being tended to by a doctor. Ahmed taking her back to the ward. She vomiting after the shock of her fall. Ahmed going off to get the cleaning equipment. And that’s when he saw it again, as clear as a creative idea: the trunk underneath Maria’s bed.
32
Ahmed had never told him what was in the trunk. Falcon checked his watch, it was ten o’clock at night. He went down to his study, found his notebook, tore through the pages to Marta’s doctor’s name — Dra Azucena Cuevas. He called the hospital in Ciempozuelos. Dra Cuevas was now back from her holiday and would be on duty in the morning. Falcon spoke to the night nurse on Marta’s ward, explained his problem and what he wanted to see. The nurse said that the only time Marta allowed the chain to be removed from her neck was for her daily shower and she would talk to Dra Cuevas about his request in the morning.
Falcon had taken one sleeping pill too many and overslept. He just managed to board the midday AVE to Madrid, which, on a Monday, was full. He was back in his suit, carrying his mac and wearing his fully loaded revolver. He called Dra Cuevas from the train. She agreed to delay Marta’s daily shower until the afternoon.
From the Estacion de Atocha he took a taxi straight out to Ciempozuelos and by 3.30 p.m. he was sitting in Dra Cuevas’s office waiting for the cleaning lady to bring up Marta’s trunk.
‘What do you know about her nurse — Ahmed?’ asked Falcon.
‘Nothing about his private life. As far as his work is concerned he is excellent, a man of infinite patience. He never even raises his voice to these unfortunate people.’
The trunk arrived and some minutes later a female nurse brought the key and locket on Marta’s chain. They opened the trunk. Inside it was a small shrine to Arturo. The lid was stuck with salvaged photos. There was a handmade birthday card with a stick woman with her eyes off her head, stiff hair and ‘Marta’ scrawled out underneath. In the body of the trunk were small metal cars, a grey child’s sock, an old school exercise book, crayons with teethmarks chewed into the ends. At the bottom were two rolls of 8mm film, just like the stock they’d found in the Mudanzas Triana warehouse. He held one up to the light. There was Arturo in the arms of his sister. He put it all away, closed the trunk and re-locked it. He flipped open the locket. It contained a single curl of brown hair. He handed the chain back to the nurse. The cleaning lady took the trunk back to the ward.
‘Where’s Ahmed now?’
‘He’s walking two of the patients in the gardens.’
‘I don’t want him to know anything about my visit.’
‘That might be difficult,’ said Dra Cuevas. ‘People talk. There’s nothing else to do here.’
