somehow lack the stuff of tragedy and yet … your father. He strikes me as that rare beast … the modern tragic figure.’
‘I just wish the play had not been my life,’ said Jimenez.
Falcon stood to leave and saw his coffee cold and undrunk on the edge of the desk. He shook Jimenez’s hand for longer than usual to show his appreciation.
‘That was why I had to call you back,’ said Jimenez. ‘I had to speak to my analyst.’
‘To ask permission?’
‘To see if he thought I was ready. He seemed to think it was a good idea that the only other person to hear my family story should be a policeman.’
‘To act on it, you mean?’
‘Because you would be bound by confidentiality,’ said the lawyer seriously.
‘Would you prefer that I didn’t talk to Consuelo about any of this?’
‘Would it serve any purpose other than to frighten her to death?’
‘She has had three children with your father.’
‘I couldn’t believe it when I heard.’
‘How
‘My father dropped me a line whenever one appeared.’
‘She had to force him into it. It was a condition of their marriage.’
‘That’s understandable.’
‘She also told me that he was obsessively security conscious. He installed a very serious door in the apartment and made it his business to lock it every night.’
Jimenez stared down at his desk.
‘She told me something else which should interest you …’
Jimenez’s head came up on a very tired neck. There was a trace of fear in his eyes. He didn’t want to hear anything that might demand more revision of his newly constructed view of events. Falcon shrugged to let him off the hook.
‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘First, she believed her gregarious restaurateur husband, with his collection of smiling photos, to be a man in the grip of abject misery.’
‘So it did get him in the end,’ said Jimenez, with no satisfaction. ‘But he probably didn’t know what
‘The second thing was a detail of the will. He left some money to his favourite charity, Nuevo Futuro —
Jimenez shook his head, in sadness or denial of the fact, it was difficult to tell. He came round to Falcon’s side of the desk and opened the door. He walked his sled-dragging walk down the corridor. Had he walked differently before his analysis? thought Falcon. Maybe he’d been stooped then, as under a weight, and now at least the baggage was behind him. Jimenez produced Falcon’s coat, helped him into it. A single question rocked in the balance of Falcon’s mind. To ask it or not?
‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ said Falcon, ‘that Arturo might still be alive? Forty-two years old he’d be by now.’
‘It used to,’ he said. ‘But it’s been better for me since I achieved a sense of finality.’
10
Even this AVE, the late one, which wouldn’t get into Seville until after midnight, was full. As the train shot through the Castillian night, Falcon brushed the crumbs of a bocadillo de chorizo from his lap and stared out of the window through the transparent reflection of the passenger opposite him. Thoughts trickled through his mind, which was tired but still racing from the intrusions he’d made into the Jimenez family.
He’d left Jose Manuel Jimenez at 3 p.m., having asked if he’d mind him visiting Marta at the San Juan de Dios mental institution in Ciempozuelos, forty kilometres south of the city. The lawyer warned him that it wasn’t likely to be a productive meeting but agreed to phone ahead so that he’d be expected. Jimenez had been right, but not for the reasons he’d thought. Marta had had a fall.
Falcon came across her in the surgery having a couple of stitches put in her eyebrow. She was ashen, which he supposed could have been her normal colouring. Her hair was black and white, wound up and pinned in a bun. Her eyes were set deep in her head and their surrounds were charcoal grey with large purple quarter-circles that reached the top of her cheekbones. It could have been bruising from the fall, but had a more permanent look to it.
A Moroccan male nurse was sitting with her, holding her hand and murmuring in a mixture of Spanish and Arabic, while a female junior doctor stitched the eyebrow which had bled profusely, spattering the hospital-issue clothing. Throughout the operation she held on to something attached to a gold chain round her neck. Falcon assumed it was a cross, but on the one occasion that she released it he saw there was a gold locket and a small key.
She was in a wheelchair. He accompanied the nurse as he pushed her back to the ward, which contained five other women. Four were silent while the fifth maintained a constant murmur of what sounded like prayer but was in fact a stream of obscenities. The Moroccan parked Marta and went to the woman, held her hand, rubbed her back.
