‘I’d like to talk to you about that but not over the phone,’ he said, and Jimenez didn’t respond. ‘I can be with you by one o’clock and be finished before lunch.’
‘It’s really not convenient.’
Falcon found himself surprisingly desperate to talk to this man, but it had to be out of police time. He went in harder.
‘I’m conducting a murder investigation, Sr Jimenez. Murder is always inconvenient.’
‘I cannot shed any light on your case, Inspector Jefe.’
‘I have to know his background.’
‘Ask his wife.’
‘What does she know about his life before 1989?’
‘Why do you have to go back so far?’
This was ludicrous, this battle to speak to the man. It made him more determined.
‘I have a curious but successful way of working, Sr Jimenez,’ he said, just to keep him on the phone. ‘What about your sister … do you ever see her?’
The ether hissed for an eternity.
‘Call me back in ten minutes,’ he said, and hung up.
Falcon paced the station concourse thinking of a new strategy for ten minutes’ time. When he called him back he had a chain of questions lined up like a cartridge belt.
‘I’ll expect you at one o’clock,’ said Jimenez, and hung up.
He bought a ticket and boarded the train. By midday the AVE had delivered him to the Estacion de Atocha in central Madrid. He took the metro to Esperanza, which seemed auspicious, and it was a short walk to the Jimenez apartment from there.
Jose Manuel Jimenez let him into the hall. He was shorter than Falcon but more powerfully built. He held his head as if ducking under a beam or carrying a load on his shoulders. As he spoke his eyes darted about under cover of some heavy, dark eyebrows, which his wife was not keeping under control. The effect, rather than being furtive, was deferential. He took Falcon’s coat and led him down a parquet-floored corridor, away from the kitchen and voices of family, to his study. He walked leaning forwards, as if dragging a sled.
The study had several overlaid Moroccan rugs that covered the parquet floor up to an English-style walnut desk. Lining the walls to the window were the bound books of a lawyer’s workplace. Coffee was offered and accepted. In the minutes he was left alone, Falcon inspected the family photographs sitting on top of a glass- fronted cupboard. He recognized Gumersinda with her two young children. There were none of Raul. There were none of the daughter beyond twelve years old. The other photographs were of Jose Manuel Jimenez’s family through the ages culminating in two graduation photographs of a boy and a girl.
Jimenez came back with the coffee. They manoeuvred around each other as Falcon found his way back to his seat and Jimenez got behind his desk. He clasped his hands; his biceps and shoulders swelled under his green tweed jacket.
‘Amongst some old shots of your father’s I came across one of my own father,’ said Falcon, going for the tangential approach.
‘My father was a restaurateur, I’m sure he had lots of photographs of his customers.’
So he knew that much about his father.
‘This was not amongst the celebrity photographs …’
‘Is your father a celebrity?’
It was a chink he had not wanted opened, but maybe, as Consuelo Jimenez had shown, revealing something of oneself could lead to surprising revelations from others.
‘My father was the painter Francisco Falcon, but that was not why —’
‘Then I’m not surprised he wasn’t on my father’s wall,’ Jimenez cut in. ‘My father had the cultural awareness of a peasant, which was what he was.’
‘I noticed he smoked Celtas with the filters broken off.’
‘He used to smoke Celtas
‘Where was he a peasant?’
‘His parents had land near Almeria, which they worked. They were killed in the Civil War and lost it all. After their deaths my father drifted. That’s all I know. It’s probably why money was always important to him.’
‘Didn’t your mother …?’
‘I doubt she knew. If she did, she didn’t tell us. I really don’t think she knew anything about his life before she met him and my father wasn’t going tell her parents until he’d got her.’
‘They met in Tangier?’
‘Yes, her family moved there in the early forties. Her father was a lawyer. He was there, like everybody else, to make money after the Civil War had left Spain in ruins. She was just a girl, eight years old maybe. My father appeared on the scene a bit later … some time in 1945, I think. He fell for her the moment he first saw her.’
‘She was still young wasn’t she? Thirteen years old?’
‘And my father was twenty-two. It was a curious relationship, which her parents were not happy about. They made her wait until she was seventeen before they let her get married.’
