Consuelo Jimenez’s words induced a trance in Falcon. His mind tumbled back over those first hours of the investigation and he hit that fear again, the surge of panic. He was on the walk down the corridor, the double walk, because it was his and the killer’s same strides towards that blank wall with its empty hook lit by the light from the horror room. Then the face, and the eyes in the face, and the terrifying relentlessness of what they’d seen.
‘Don Javier,’ she said, which snapped him back to reality because she hadn’t used his rank.
‘Please excuse me,’ he said. ‘I was lost. I mean I was elsewhere.’
‘It didn’t look like somewhere I would want to be,’ she said.
‘I was just running over some things in my mind.’
Then you must have seen some terrible things. You said yourself, about Raul’s murder, the most extraordinary of your career.’
‘Yes, I did say that, but this wasn’t anything to do with that,’ he said, and found himself on the brink of a confession, which was not, he thought, a place the Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homicidios should ever be.
4
He offered her a car. She turned him down and said she’d make her own way to her sister’s house. He asked for her sister’s details just to keep the pressure on, and reminded her that he would pick her up later to go to the Instituto Anatomico Forense for the identification of the body. He wanted to interview her then, once she’d been shocked out of any residual complacency by the sight of her husband’s dead body. He asked her to think about anything unusual in Raul’s business or personal life in the last year and told her to call the restaurant to get the names and addresses of the three people who’d been fired for feeding her husband against orders. He knew they would be dead leads, but he wanted to induce a fear in her of his thoroughness. They shook hands at the door of the apartment; his were damp, hers dry and cool.
Ramirez followed him back into Raul Jimenez’s study from the hall.
‘Did she do it,’ he asked, slumping into the high-backed chair, ‘or have it done, Inspector Jefe?’
Falcon turned his pen over and over in his fingers.
‘Any news from Perez at the hospital?’ he asked.
‘The maid’s still out cold.’
‘And the CCTV tapes?’
‘Four people unidentified by the conserje. Two males. Two females. One of the females I would say is the whore, but she looks very young. Fernandez has taken the tapes down to the station and we’ll get some digitalized printouts to show around the building.’
‘What about people leaving the building by alternative exits? The garage, for instance.’
‘Neither of those cameras are working. The conserje called the technicians this morning but they still haven’t arrived. Semana Santa, Inspector Jefe,’ he explained.
Falcon gave him the names and addresses of the fired employees and told him to have them interviewed as soon as possible. Ramirez left. Falcon picked up the photograph of Raul Jimenez’s first wife — Gumersinda Bautista. He called the Jefatura and asked them to run a check on Jose Manuel Jimenez Bautista, born in Tangier in the late 1940s, early 1950s.
He sat back with the other photographs, flicked through the nameless people. He came across a shot of Raul Jimenez on the deck of a yacht. He was barely recognizable. No hint of the toadiness to come. He was handsome and confident and stood as if he knew it, hands on hips, shoulders braced, chest puffed out. Falcon brushed his thumb over that chest, thinking there was a speck on the photograph. It stayed and on closer inspection looked to be some kind of wound to his right pectoral near the armpit. He flipped it over —
His mobile rang. The police computer had come up with a Madrid address and telephone number for Jose Manuel Jimenez. He took them down and asked after Serrano and Baena, two other officers from his group. They were off for Semana Santa. He ordered them to be sent down to him at the Jimenez apartment.
Instead of reviewing his notes and planning his next assault on the cultivated defences of Dona Consuelo Jimenez, who, he couldn’t deny it, was still his prime suspect, he found himself reaching for the sheaf of old photographs. There were some group shots, again from Tangier, in 1954 according to the dates on the back. He looked over the faces, thinking that he was trying to find his father in there until he realized that he was concentrating more on the women and was wondering if his mother, who’d died seven years after these photographs were taken, was amongst these strangers. He was fascinated at the prospect of finding a shot of her he’d never seen, in the company of people he’d never heard of, in a time before he was born. Some of the faces were too small and grainy and he decided to take them home and look at them under his magnifying glass.
He took a cigarette from the pack of Celtas, sniffed it. He hadn’t smoked for fifteen years. He’d given up when he was thirty, on the same day he’d terminated his relationship of five years with Isabel Alamo. She’d been heartbroken, not least because she’d assumed their private talk was going to be a marriage proposal. In the ghastliness of that memory he broke off the filter, picked up the Bic and lit the cigarette. It was horrible even without inhaling and he set it down on the ashtray. He leaned back in the chair as his mind shot back to another memory back in Tangier on New Year’s Eve 1963. He was standing by the stairs in his pyjamas, waist height to all the leaving guests, who were going down to the port for the firework display. Mercedes, his second mother, his father’s second wife, picked him up and took him back upstairs to bed. This smell was in her hair, Celtas; somebody must have been smoking the same brand at the party. There were still plenty Of Spaniards in Tangier in those days, even though the really good times were long over. Mercedes had put him to bed, kissed him hard, squeezed him to her bosom. He left the memory at that point. He never took it forward from there because … he just didn’t. He was interested to find that this new smell could take him back to that time. Normally he only ever thought of Mercedes when he came across Chanel No.5, her perfume of choice.
A knock at the door brought him back. Serrano and Baena stood in the corridor.
‘You were quick,’ said Falcon.
