The Blind Man of Seville

And that was when it had started.

It wasn’t a question of looking back at that moment and realizing later that it had been a turning point. The change was not subtle. A difference in body chemistry has a way of making itself immediately felt. Sweat came up inside his gloves and at a spot high on his forehead just out of the hairline. The taut pattering of his heart stopped him and he began to find oxygen in the air difficult to come by. He hyperventilated for some seconds, pinched at his throat to try to encourage a better intake. His body was telling him that there was something to fear while his brain was indicating otherwise.

His brain was making the usual dispassionate observations. Raul Jimenez’s feet were bare, his ankles secured to the chair legs. Some furniture was out of place, at odds with the rest of the room. Indentations in the expensive rug, Persian, showed the normal position of the chair. The lead to the TV/video was stretched taut because the rolling cabinet was some metres from its normal position by the wall socket in the corner. A ball of cloth, which looked like socks tracked with saliva and blood, lay on the floor by the desk. Windows, double-glazed, were shut, curtains drawn back. A large soapstone ashtray sat on the desk, full of pinched stubs and whole, clean filters which had been broken off from the cigarettes whose pack lay alongside, brand name Celtas. Cheap cigarettes. The cheapest. Only the cheapest for Raul Jimenez, owner of four of the most popular restaurants in Seville, with two others in Sanlucar de Barrameda and Puerto Santa Maria down on the coast. Only the cheapest for Raul Jimenez in his ninety-million-pesetas apartment in Los Remedios, overlooking the Feria ground, with his celebrity photographs hanging on the wall behind his leather-inlaid desk. Raul with the torero El Cordobes. Raul with the TV presenter Ana Rosa Quintana. Raul, my God, Raul with a carving knife behind a jamon which had to be a top quality Pata Negra because he was flanked by Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith, who was looking completely appalled at the cloven hoof pointing at her right breast.

Still the sweat didn’t stop but appeared elsewhere. Top lip, small of the back, trickling down to his waist from his armpit. He knew what he was doing. He was pretending, persuading himself that it was hot in the room, that the coffee he’d just taken … He hadn’t had any coffee.

The face.

For a dead man it was a face with presence. Like El Greco’s saints whose eyes never left you alone.

Were they following him?

Falcon moved to one side. Yes. Then the other. Absurd. The tricks of the mind. He pulled himself together, clenched a latex fist.

He stepped over the taut lead from the wall to the TV/video and went behind the dead man’s chair. He looked up to the ceiling and let his eyes fall on to Raul Jimenez’s wire-wool hair. The back of the head was matted thick, black and red, from where he’d rammed his head repeatedly against the carved coat of arms on the chair back. The head was still secured to the chair with flex. Originally it must have been tight but Jimenez had gained some slack through his struggle. The flex had cut deeply into the flesh beneath his nose and had ridden up until it had bitten into the cartilaginous material of the septum and it had even sawn through that to reach the bone of the bridge. The nose was hanging off his face. The flex had also cut into the flesh over his cheekbones as he’d thrown his head from side to side.

Falcon turned away from the profile only to see the full frontal in the blank TV screen. He blinked, wanting to close those staring eyes, which, even in reflection, penetrated. His stomach leapt at the thought of the horror images that had forced a man to do this to himself. Were they still there, burned on to the retina, or further back in the brain in some cubist digitalized state?

He shook his head, unused to these wild thoughts interfering with his investigative coolness. He moved around to confront the gory face, not quite full on because the TV/video cabinet was up against the man’s knees, and, at this moment, Javier Falcon came up against his first physical failing. His legs would not bend. None of the usual motor messages could get beyond the roiling panic in his chest and stomach. He did what the Juez de Guardia had advised and looked out of the window. He noted the brightness of the April morning, remembered that restlessness as he’d got dressed in the shuttered dark, the uneasiness left after a long, lonely winter with too much rain. So much rain that even he had noticed how the city’s gardens had burgeoned to the density of jungle, to the richness of an abundant botanical exhibit. He looked down on the Feria ground, which two weeks from now would be transformed into a tented Seville crowded with casetas, marquees, for the week-long session of eating, drinking fino and dancing Sevillanas until dawn. He breathed in deeply and lowered himself to meet Raul Jimenez’s face.

The terrible staring effect was produced by the man’s eyeballs bulging out of his head as if he had a thyroid problem. Falcon glanced up at the photos. Jimenez was not bug-eyed in any of them. This was caused by … His synapses shunted like cars crunching into each other nose to tail. The visible ball of the eye. The blood down the face. The coagulation on the jaw line. And these? What are these delicate things on his shirtfront? Petals. Four of them. But rich, exotic, fleshy as orchids with these fine filaments, just like fly-catchers. But petals … here?

He reeled backwards, his feet kicking at the rug edge and the parquet flooring as he fell over the television lead, yanking the plug out of the wall socket. He crabbed on the heels of his hands and feet until he hit the wall and sat legs splayed, thighs twitching, shoes nodding.

Eyelids. Two top. Two bottom. Nothing could have prepared him for that.

‘Are you all right, Inspector Jefe?’

‘Is that you, Inspector Ramirez?’ he asked, getting up slowly, messily.

‘The Policia Cientifica are ready to move in.’

‘Send the Medico Forense down here.’

Ramirez slipped out of the doorframe. Falcon shook himself down. The Medico Forense appeared.

‘Did you see that this man had had his eyelids cu—his eyelids removed?’

‘Claro, Inspector Jefe. The Juez de Guardia and I had to satisfy ourselves that the man was dead. I saw that the man’s eyelids had been removed and … it’s all in my notes. The secretaria has noted it, too. It’s hardly something you’d miss.’

‘No, no, I didn’t doubt that … I was just surprised that it wasn’t mentioned to me.’

‘I think Juez Calderon was about to tell you, but …’

The bald head of the Medico Forense rolled on his shoulders.

‘But what …?’