The Blind Man of Seville

patio. They sipped the whisky. Falcon asked after her children. She replied with her mind elsewhere.

‘I went to Madrid on Friday,’ he said. ‘I went to see your husband’s eldest son.’

‘You’re very thorough, Don Javier,’ she said. ‘I’m not used to such rigour after so many years of living with the natives.’

‘I’m especially rigorous when fascinated.’

She crossed her legs, flexed her toes under the red satin band of the mule, which was pointed in his direction. She seemed like someone who would know what to do in bed and be quite demanding, but rewarding with it. Salacious thoughts followed his idle theorizing and he saw her kneeling with her black skirt rucked up over her haunches, looking back over her shoulder at him. He shook his head, not used to these uncontrolled ideas rampaging through his mind. He made a conscious effort to subdue any recklessness, concentrated on the ice in his glass.

‘You wanted to know why Gumersinda killed herself,’ she said.

‘I was interested in your husband’s abject misery, as you called it, which must have been Gumersinda’s state, too, when she died. I wanted to know what could have caused such devastation.’

‘Are all policemen like you?’

‘We’re like people … each one of us is different,’ said Falcon.

‘Did you find out?’

Throughout the account of his conversation with Jose Manuel, Consuelo Jimenez’s jaunty sexiness disappeared. The shoe, which had been so close to his knee, was withdrawn and joined its partner on the marble flagstones of the patio floor. Only the padded shoulders of her jacket had any shape by the time he’d finished. Falcon poured more whisky.

‘Los Ninos de la Calle,’ he said.

‘I was thinking that, too,’ she said.

‘His obsession with security.’

‘I would have had to have found out what Raul had done. I wouldn’t have been able to leave it. I’d have to know that to understand him … his motives.’

‘What if you had to give up your entire life to the task?’

She lit another cigarette.

‘Do you think this has any bearing on the murder?’

‘I asked him whether he thought Arturo might still be alive,’ said Falcon.

‘And had returned to take his revenge?’ said Sra Jimenez. ‘That’s absurd. I’m sure they killed the poor boy.’

‘Why? I’m just as sure they would make use of him … knotting carpets or whatever.’

‘Like a slave?’ she said. ‘And what if he escaped?’

‘Have you ever been to somewhere like Fez?’ he asked. ‘Think of Seville, with most of its major buildings removed, all its squares and greenery torn out, and then compress it all so that the streets are narrower, the houses almost touching overhead and finally stew it, so that everything is falling apart. Multiply that by a hundred, subtract a thousand years from today’s date and that is Fez. You could go into the Medina as a child and come out an old man without having walked each street. If he ever managed to escape and found his way out of the Medina without being caught, where could he go? Who is he? Where are his papers? He belongs nowhere and to nobody.’

Consuelo shrank from that terrible possibility.

‘So is that who you’re looking for now?’

‘Senior policemen, I mean people with budgets to run a police force, have an aversion to fantasy. I would have to do a lot better than produce a record of my conversation with Jose Manuel to persuade them to start that kind of a manhunt,’ said Falcon. ‘We have to be more plodding, less inventive, because everything we do ends up going before a judge and they loathe fiction in their courts.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Look through your husband’s life and see what comes up,’ he said. ‘You could help.’

‘Would that get me off the suspects list?’

‘Not until we find the murderer,’ he said. ‘But it might save me a lot of time trying to find my way around a seventy-eight-year life.’

‘I can only help with the last ten.’

‘Well, that includes a time when he was in the public eye … Expo ‘92.’

‘The building committee,’ she said.

‘There’s also that interesting phenomenon of “black” pesetas wanting to become “white” euros.’

‘I’m sure you already know about the restaurant business.’

‘I’m not interested in a little tax fraud, Dona Consuelo. That’s not my department. I have to look at things with more dramatic possibilities. Stuff, for instance, that would require a great deal of trust and where perhaps trust was broken and fortunes lost, lives ruined, leaving powerful motives for revenge.’

‘Is that why you’re a homicide cop?’ she asked, getting to her feet.

He didn’t answer, walked her to the door, tried not to listen to her kitten heels tapping out Morse code for S-