The Blind Man of Seville

‘He only knows that Raul was impotent and that I have physical needs.’

‘Do you know where he was last night?’

‘Ah, yes, of course. It would be the lover who would do the deed,’ she said. ‘You’ll meet Basilio and then you must tell me what you think he’s capable of.’

They passed the Basilica de La Macarena and a few minutes later pulled up by an austere grey building on Avenida Sanchez Pizjuan that housed the Instituto Anatomico Forense. A crowd of people were gathered outside the doors. Falcon parked up inside the hospital barrier. Consuelo Jimenez put on a pair of sunglasses. The crowd were on them as soon as they got out of the car, Dictaphones pointing. Loose words blasted out from the cacophony and cut like shrapnel — ‘marido’, ‘asesinado’, ‘brutalmente’. Falcon took her by the arm and pushed past them, got her through the door and slammed it behind him.

He walked her through the corridors to the office of the Medico Forense, who took them to the viewing room. The official pulled back the curtain and, beyond the glass panel, lit from above, lay Raul Jimenez under a sheet that was pulled down over his chest. Two candles burned by his head. His eyes, clean of blood, stared up at the ceiling. There was nothing in them. The back of his head, previously matted with gore, had been washed clean. The nose had been miraculously reattached and the scarring from the flex on his cheeks had gone. The old wound to his right pectoral, seen in the photograph, now looked like the worst thing his body had suffered. Consuelo Jimenez formally identified the body. The curtain was closed. Falcon asked her to wait while he had a short discussion with the Medico Forense, who told him that Raul Jimenez had died at three in the morning. He had suffered a brain haemorrhage and heart failure. There was an extremely high level of Viagra in his blood. It was the doctor’s conclusion that the increased blood pressure and high degree of distress combined with the clogged condition of the victim’s arteries had caused Raul Jimenez to more or less internally burst. He gave Falcon his official typed report.

They ran the gauntlet to the car and rather than go back through the barrier, which was blocked by the journalists, he headed through the grounds of the faculty and out past the main hospital building on to Calle de San Juan de Ribera.

‘They should have closed his eyes,’ said Consuelo Jimenez. ‘You cannot be at peace with your eyes still open, even if they don’t see anything.’

‘They couldn’t close his eyes,’ he said as the traffic lights released them to turn left on to Calle Munoz Leon.

He drove past the old city walls and found a parking space in the busy street. Sra Jimenez clung to the roof grip, her knuckles whitening, her face already beginning to shrink from the words that she knew were coming her way. The worst of his career.

He told her how it was, with no soft focus, giving his own appalled version. Yes, it had been the worst of his career. There were scenes he’d had to ‘process’ which perhaps sounded worse — walking into an apartment in a high-rise block in an urbanizacion on the outskirts of Madrid, four dead in the sitting room, blood up the walls, two dead in the kitchen, needles, syringes, tinfoil floating on gore and, in the bedroom, a child whimpering on a soiled cot. But that was all expected horror in a culture of brutality. The torture of Raul Jimenez was something he could not be objective about and not just because he was sensitive about eyes, which were so important to his work. It was how the killer’s punishment of his victim had worked on his own imagination. It terrified him, the notion of the sheer relentlessness of reality, the lack of visual respite. As Sra Jimenez had noted, not even in death could he be seen to enjoy the big sleep but had to lie in eternal, wide-eyed horror at man’s capacity for evil.

Sra Jimenez had started crying. Really crying. This was no dabbing at the mascara but a bawling, retching, snot-streaked breakdown. Javier Falcon understood the cruelty of police work. He was not the man to comfort this woman. It was he who had put the images in her head. His job, the point of his job at this moment, was to observe not just the veracity of the emotional display but also to perceive the opening, the crack in the carapace where he would jam in his lever. It had been his conscious tactic to get her in a car, in an enclosed bubble in a busy street with nowhere to go, while an indifferent world crashed by, oblivious to the enormity.

‘You were in the Hotel Colon last night?’ he said and she nodded. ‘Were you alone after your children had gone to bed?’

She shook her head.

‘Was Basilio Lucena with you last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘All night?’

‘No.’

‘What time did he leave?’

‘We had dinner in the room. We went to bed. He must have left by two o’clock.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘Home, I suppose.’

‘He didn’t go to the Edificio Presidente?’

Silence. No answer, while Falcon looked into the structure of her face.

‘What does Basilio Lucena do for a living?’ he asked.

‘Something useless at the university. He’s a lecturer.’

‘What department?’

‘One of the sciences. Biology or chemistry — I can’t remember. We never talked about it. It doesn’t interest him. It’s a position and a salary, that’s all.’

‘Did you give him a key?’

‘To the apartment?’ she said, shaking her head at him. ‘Meet Basilio before you even …’

‘How do you know I haven’t?’