The two men shuffled in, uneasy with their boss who they assumed was being sarcastic. They’d been forty minutes.
‘Traffic,’ said Baena, which solved the problem both ways.
Falcon was mystified by the sight of the cigarette reduced to an ash snake in front of him. A glance at his watch left him stunned to find that it was past eleven o’clock and he’d achieved nothing. He checked his notes to see when Ramirez had timed the removals men’s lunch break and ordered Serrano and Baena to go out on the streets to try to find a witness who’d seen someone, probably in overalls, climbing up the lifting gear to the sixth floor of the Edificio Presidente.
Sub-Inspector Perez called saying the maid, Dolores Oliva, had finally come round. She wouldn’t speak until she had a rosary in her hand and throughout the interview she fingered a key ring of the Virgen del Rocio. She was convinced she had come into contact with pure evil and that it might have found a way in. Falcon tapped the desk. It was always like this with Perez. The academy and eleven years in the field had not been able to break down his need to tell a story in a report. It took eight minutes for him to reveal that Dolores Oliva had opened the door with five turns of the key.
Falcon cut Perez off and told him to get down to Los Remedios as soon as possible to work the apartments in the block with the print-outs of the unidentified persons from the CCTV tapes. The prostitute had to be identified and found, too. He hung up and saw that there was a message for him from the Medico Forense saying that the autopsy was complete and a written report was being typed out. He thought for a moment about whether he should let Consuelo Jimenez see the body in its full horror and decided that it would be better to keep the eyelid removal as police information only. He called the Medico Forense back and asked him to make the body clean and presentable.
He arranged to pick up Consuelo Jimenez from her sister’s house in San Bernardo and went down to his car calling Fernandez and telling him to make contact with Perez to work the apartments.
It was fiercely bright outside after the darkness of the apartment and nearly warm. It was always the same around Semana Santa and the Feria, a most ambiguous time of year. Neither hot nor cold. Neither dry nor wet. Neither religious nor secular. He got into his car and threw the sheaf of old photographs on the seat. The one of Gumersinda, Raul’s first wife, was on top. It was a formal shot and she was staring earnestly into the camera, but it was Consuelo Jimenez’s words that came to mind: ‘He totally failed to love me.’ Two bizarre thoughts clashed in his mind, squirting adrenalin into his system, which made him start the car and pull out without looking. Tyres squealed. A muffled shout of
He made a U-turn and crossed the river over the Puente del Generalisimo. The port railway tracks streamed beneath him and the cranes formed a guard of honour down to the massive Puente del V Centenario, which rose out of the urban mist. His thoughts burgeoned as he headed northeast past the Parque de Maria Luisa and he desperately wanted that cigarette he’d let burn to ash in Raul Jimenez’s study. What had come into his mind were the words of his wife, Ines, whom he, too, had failed to love: ‘You have no heart, Javier Falcon,’ and this had been entangled with the sight of Gumersinda, a woman from his mother’s era, which had made him think of his blood mother, Pilar, and then his stepmother, Mercedes. All these women, immensely important to him, he now thought he’d somehow failed.
The idea was so new and peculiar it made him quite desperate to be active and unconscious.
He sat at the traffic lights, his fingers jittering over the steering wheel, muttering: ‘This is madness’ because this did not happen to him. He did not have random inexplicable thoughts. He had never been by nature a day- dreamer. He had always been calm and methodical, which characteristics could not be applied to him now. From the moment he’d seen Raul’s terrible face there’d been something no less cataclysmic than a genetic mutation. His mind was flooding with uncomfortable memories, sweat welled up from his forehead and dampened his hands, his concentration was shot. He hadn’t even got this investigation under control. He hadn’t checked the windows and doors out on to the balcony in the Jimenez apartment. First steps. And that business with the TV, yanking the cord out of the wall and not mentioning it. It was unprofessional. It was not him.
He cruised up Calle Balbino Murron right to the end, to a building that overlooked the soccer pitch in the Colegio de los Jesuitas. He put the photos in the glove compartment. Consuelo Jimenez came out on her own before he reached the house. A child, probably the youngest, stood in the window. She waved and the boy waved frantically back. It saddened Falcon. He saw himself in the window, left behind.
They set off, cutting across the main arterial roads going into the centre of town. She looked straight ahead, not taking much in beyond the glass.
‘Have you told the children yet?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to tell them and then leave them to go to the hospital.’
‘They must know something is wrong.’
‘They see I’m nervous. They don’t know why they are with their aunt. They keep asking me why we aren’t in the house in Heliopolis and when is Daddy going to bring the present he promised.’
‘The dog?’
‘You can be quite impressive, Inspector Jefe,’ she said. ‘You don’t have children, do you?’
‘No … ‘ he said, wanting to fill that out somehow.
They continued in silence, heading north towards La Macarena.
‘How is the investigation going?’ she asked, polite, distant.
‘It’s early days.’
‘So you only have the obvious motive to go on.’
‘Which is?’
‘Wife wants to get rid of unloving older husband, inherit his fortune and disappear with younger lover.’
‘People have killed for less.’
‘What about Basilio Lucena?’
