It was a calculated offence, which had its desired effect of shocking Ramirez, who Lucena could see was from a different class to his own. The Inspector was from a conservative, working-class Sevillano family and lived with his wife and two daughters in his parents’ house. His mother was still alive and living with them and when his father- in-law died, which would be any week now, his mother-in-law would join them. Ramirez balled his fist. Nobody talked like that about mothers to him.
‘We’re leaving now,’ said Falcon, gripping Ramirez by his swollen bicep.
‘I want to get … I want to get the phone number of the other maricon,’ said Ramirez, the words bottling in his throat. He wrenched his arm away from Falcon.
Lucena went to the desk, slashed a pen across some paper and handed it to Falcon, who manoeuvred Ramirez out of the room.
Outside the Calle Rio de la Plata was moving as slowly as the river through Buenos Aires. Sra Jimenez was down at the end of the street, her rage bristling in the sunlight. Ramirez was no less angry. Falcon stood between them, no longer the detective, more the social worker.
‘Get Fernandez on the mobile,’ he said to Ramirez. ‘See if they’ve found the girl yet.’
Lucena’s door slammed shut. Falcon headed down the street to Consuelo Jimenez thinking: Was that the sophistication you were talking about that so entranced you? What are we now? Where are we? This society with no rules of engagement.
She was crying, but from anger this time. She gritted her teeth and stamped her feet in humiliation. Falcon drew alongside her, hands in pockets. He nodded as if agreeing with her but thinking: This is policework — one moment on the brink of cracking the case and packing up early for celebratory beers and the next back on the street wondering how you could have been so facile.
‘I’ll run you back to your sister’s house,’ he said.
‘What did I do to him?’ she asked. ‘What did I
‘Nothing,’ said Falcon.
‘What a day,’ she said, looking up into the perfect sky, all serenity a long way off, beyond the stratosphere. ‘What a fucking day.’
She stared into the mash of tissue in her hand like a haruspex who might find reason, clarity or a future. She threw it in the gutter. He took her arm and turned her towards the car. As he helped her in, Ramirez said they’d found the girl from the Alameda and were taking her down to the Jefatura on Blas Infante.
‘Tell Fernandez to interview that last employee that Sra Jimenez fired. Perez should leave the girl to sweat until we get there. I want all reports filed at four-thirty before we go to see Juez Calderon at five.’
Falcon called Marciano Ruiz’s mobile and told him he would have to come back to Seville to make a statement tonight. There was a protest from Ruiz, which was followed by a threat from Falcon to arrest Lucena.
‘Are you calm?’ he asked Ramirez, who nodded over the roof of the car. ‘Take Sr Lucena down to the Jefatura and get a written statement out of him … and don’t be rough.’
Falcon led Lucena out of his house and put him in the back of Ramirez’s car. They all left. Falcon hunched over the steering wheel, muttering in his head as the tyres hissed down Avenida de Borbolla. Everybody was mental today. Some cases did this. They grated too much. Normally the child cases. The kidnapping followed by the wait and the inevitable discovery of the abused body. This was the same … as if something terrible had been added to the excesses of the human experience and had subtracted something greater which could never be replaced. The daylight would always be a little dimmer, the air never quite as fresh.
‘Do you see a lot of this?’ asked Sra Jimenez. ‘Yes, I suppose you do, I suppose you see it all the time.’
‘What?’ said Falcon, shrugging, knowing what she meant, not wanting to get into it.
‘People with perfect lives, who see them destroyed in a matter of … ‘
‘Never,’ he replied at the edge of vehemence.
That word — ‘perfect’ — hardened him and he remembered her earlier words which had flayed his ‘perfect’ life alive: ‘I think that’s harder. To be dumped because she would rather be alone.’ He felt cruel and fought the urge to retaliate: ‘I think that’s hard … to be dumped for a male lover.’ He filed it in his mind under ‘Unworthy’ and replaced it with the thought that maybe Ines had ruined women for him.
‘Surely, Inspector Jefe …’ she said.
‘No, never,’ he said, ‘because I’ve never met anybody with a perfect life. A perfect past and a pristine future, yes. But the perfect past is always brilliantly edited and the pristine future a hopeless dream. The only perfect life is the one on paper, and even then there are those spaces between the words and lines and they’re rarely patches of nothing.’
‘Yes, we are careful,’ she said, ‘careful of what we show to others and of what we reveal to ourselves.’
‘I didn’t mean to be so … intense,’ he said. ‘We’ve had a long day and there’s more to come. We’ve had some shocks.’
‘I can’t believe I’m still such an idiot,’ she said. ‘I met Basilio in the lift of the Edificio Presidente. He was probably on his way down from the eighth floor. I didn’t think. But … but why would he …
‘Forget him. He’s not important.’
‘Unless he’s given me something.’
‘Take a test,’ said Falcon, more brutal than he intended. ‘But start thinking too, Dona Consuelo, about who could possibly have a motive for killing your husband. I want names and addresses of all his friends. I want you to remember, for instance, who it was who told you how much you resembled the first wife. I want Raul’s diary.’
‘He had a desk diary in the office which I kept up. He threw away his address book when he got his mobile phone. He only spoke to people on the phone anyway. He had no use for paper and he always lost pens and stole mine.’
