The Blind Man of Seville

‘What was that?’

Ramirez jolted in his seat. He was barely watching the damn thing, too. The whole business a waste of time as far as he was concerned.

‘I saw something,’ said Falcon. ‘Something in the background. Top right. Can we rewind it?’

Ramirez hovered around the screen like a bluebottle over dung. His large and imprecise finger stabbed at the machine and the figures started sprinting backwards. Another stab and they moved at a more dignified pace.

It was after the ceremony at the mausoleum. The mourners were drifting away. Falcon watched the background — the sawteeth of family mausoleum roofs, the flat lines of the high ossuary blocks where poorer individuals’ bones lay. The camera started a slow pan from left to right.

‘Was that it again?’ asked Falcon, not sure now that he was concentrating.

‘I didn’t see anything,’ said Ramirez, stifling a yawn.

‘Get that guy back in here and let’s freeze the picture.’

Ramirez brought the young policeman back in and he replayed the sequence frame by frame.

‘There,’ said Falcon, ‘top right, against the white mausoleum.’

‘Joder,’ said Ramirez. ‘Do you think that’s him?’

‘You caught him just at the end of that pan.’

‘Eight frames,’ said the young policeman. ‘That’s one-third of a second. I don’t know how you saw that.’

‘I didn’t see it,’ said Falcon. ‘It just caught my eye.’

‘He’s filming the mourners,’ said Ramirez.

‘He must have seen you with your camera and fallen back behind the mausoleum wall,’ said Falcon. ‘But that, I’m pretty sure, is one-third of a second of our killer.’

They watched the video three times over and got nothing more out of it. They went to the computer department and found an operator still working. He digitalized the tape images and fed the eight frames into the computer, sectioned out the vital element and blew it up to screen size. There was some distortion but not so much that they couldn’t see how careful this person was being about his appearance. He wore a black baseball cap with no brand mark. The peak was turned to ten o’clock so that he could get the camera cleanly to his eye. He wore gloves and had a roll-neck jumper up over his mouth and nose. He was kneeling and his dark coat was flush with the ground.

‘We can’t even tell what sex “he” is,’ said Falcon.

‘I can clean these images up for you,’ said the operator. ‘It’ll take me the weekend, but I can do it for you.’

They took a print-out of the frame and went back to Falcon’s office.

‘So, what was he doing there?’ said Falcon, sitting at his desk. ‘Was he filming someone in particular or just the scene in general?’

‘The end of his work,’ said Ramirez. ‘The bastard dead and buried. That’s my guess.’

‘Would he take that sort of a risk just for personal satisfaction?’

‘Not such a risk. We don’t normally film mourners at a victim’s funeral,’ said Ramirez.

‘It could be the end of that piece of work and the start of the next,’ said Falcon.

‘Wasn’t that what you were implying before we went to the cemetery?’

‘I don’t remember implying anything.’

‘You said that undisturbed minds can become disturbed. Isn’t that the same thing?’

‘A madman with a malignant motive,’ said Falcon. ‘Or a motiveless madman who’s malign.’

Ramirez looked behind him to see if someone more intelligent had just entered the room.

‘It’s the point, though, isn’t it?’ said Falcon. ‘We still don’t know enough to break off any line of inquiry.’

He stuck the print-out up on the wall.

‘It’s like that game in kids’ magazines,’ said Ramirez, slumping back in his chair. ‘You have to guess the identity of a pop star from an eye or a nose or a mouth. My kids think that I should be good at it because I’m a policeman, but they don’t seem to understand that I don’t know who any of these people are. Who the hell is Ricky Martin?’

‘Son of Dean?’ said Falcon, with no idea.

‘Who the fuck is Dean Martin?’

It set Falcon off. Hysteria broke. Maybe it was the disturbed nights with strange dreams. He laughed madly and silently. Tears brimmed and he dashed them away. He writhed in his seat as wave after wave engulfed him. Ramirez looked at him like a lawyer with an unreliable client who has to take the stand.

Ramirez called the men in the field, listened to their reports. Nothing. He left for lunch. Falcon pulled himself together and went home still stunned by his outburst, the fact that it had happened to him, that loss of self-control. He ate something Encarnacion had left on the cooker without registering what it was. He went to bed, hoping for an hour’s sleep. He woke at 9 p.m. in the pitch black of his bedroom. He jerked out of sleep as if someone had tugged at a knot in his stomach. He’d seen drunks do the same, coming to in the cells as if plugged straight back into the mains of life. He was groggy and his tongue was coated with something nasty. His limbs were stiff and his joints creaking.

He stood under the shower and let the water pummel the mess out of him. His head and insides were like a