The Blind Man of Seville

back to a position where they are weaker than they were before. As Oscar told me: ‘It is always easier to react than to be original. You’ll find the same holds for art as in life.’

26th January 1939, Barcelona

Yesterday we came into the empty city behind unopposed tanks. We’d crossed the Llobregat River the day before and could already smell the desperation that hung above the collapsing republican will. There was no sense of triumph. We were exhausted to the point of not even knowing if we were glad to be alive. By evening we were in control and it was then that our supporters felt safe enough to venture out into the streets to rejoice and, of course, to take their revenge on the defeated. We did not stop them.

15

Monday, 16th April 2001, Falcon’s house, Calle Bailen, Seville

Another 20,000-volt wake-up call, as if he’d had a heart attack and been defibrillated back to life. His watch told him it was six o’clock, which meant that he’d had an hour and a half of sleep, or rather not sleep, more like death. The brain, a strange organ that kept him awake with a torment of thoughts about his father, the Civil War, art, death … and then, just as he was about to give up on the possibility of ever sleeping again — shut down. No dreams. No rest. But a respite. The brain, unable to stand any more of the endless babble, had brought down the shutter.

He dragged himself, heart pounding, to the exercise bike and started working out until he had the sensation of being pursued to the point of glancing over his shoulder. He stopped, dismounted, wondered if this was bad for him, psychologically — the expending of vast amounts of energy to go nowhere. Agitated stasis. He needed it though, to lull himself out of the cyclical thinking. Cyclical? That was it. He was just doing with his body what he was doing with his mind. He ran down to the river and up to the Torre del Oro and back. He saw no one.

He was the first in the office, having driven through silent streets. He sat at his desk, desolate amongst the spartan furniture and the piled concrete silence of the Jefatura. Ramirez turned up at 8.30 and Falcon greeted him with the news of Eloisa Gomez’s disappearance. He checked the incident room, but there had been very little activity. Seville was too worn out after a week of passionate Mariolatry and bacchanalia to lift a phone.

Ramirez produced the envelope he’d picked up from the computer room. All eight of the images of the disappearing cameraman from the cemetery were there and the operator had sharpened up the two best examples, but they still didn’t help. There was no visible eye, the nose was in shadow from the peaked baseball cap and the jaw line was obscured by the collar of the coat. There was visible skin, but its colour and texture was unclear. The computer operator had shown the pictures to a CCTV expert who’d ventured the opinion that the killer was male, between twenty and forty years old.

‘It’s not going to help us,’ said Ramirez, ‘but it’ll be something for Juez Calderon to feast on. Our first sighting of the killer … better than no sighting at all.’

‘But who is he?’ asked Falcon, surprising Ramirez with his sudden savagery. ‘Is he acting alone? Is he being paid? What is his motive?’

‘Are we even sure now that he was unknown to his victim?’ asked Ramirez, taking up Falcon’s tone.

‘I’m sure. I wouldn’t like to have to prove it in court, but I’m certain that he got his information from Mudanzas Triana, he used Eloisa Gomez to get into the flat, and he waited until the maid arrived to get out. And it was all done to confuse us.’

‘Then I think we should bring Consuelo Jimenez in and sweat her about the sighting … see if she breaks down under pressure,’ said Ramirez. ‘She is the only one close to the victim, with all the necessary information and a defined motive.’

‘At this point I want to work with Consuelo Jimenez rather than against her. I’m meeting her at midday to sort through all her husband’s business associates, divide them into those with and without motive.’

‘Doesn’t that put her in control of our investigation, Inspector Jefe?’

‘Not quite … because we’ll be doing our own digging. You came up with Joaquin Lopez of Cinco Bellotas. He’s worth an interview. Perez can go down to the town hall and get the names of any companies who had contact with the Expo ‘92 Building Committee. Fernandez will go down to the licensing department and pull names from there and then he can go on to the health and fire departments and only when we’ve been through everything, right down to the people who come in to the restaurants to sell flowers to customers who are forgetting to be romantic, will we leave Sra Jimenez alone. So we work with her, but she will feel the pressure.’

‘What about the local hoods?’

‘If there’d been something wrong there, one of the restaurants would have been burnt down, not the owner tortured and killed. But we still put out our feelers.’

‘Drugs?’ said Ramirez. ‘Seeing as we’re dealing with extreme behaviour, psychopathic violence.’

‘Talk to Narcotics. See if Raul Jimenez or anyone associated with him has ever been under any kind of surveillance.’

The rest of the squad arrived over the next quarter of an hour and Falcon briefed them, showed them the images from the video tape and fired them up to do a long, hard day’s boring work. He asked Serrano about the chloroform and surgical instruments; nothing so far from the hospitals, who were still checking their stocks, and he was working his way around the labs. He sent Baena down to Mudanzas Triana to interview the workers specifically to find out what they were doing on Saturday morning at the time of the Jimenez funeral. They left and he took a long call from Juez Calderon in which he covered the same ground, and another from Comisario Lobo. Normally this endless repetition would have annoyed him, but today both Calderon and Lobo had terminated the calls. After that he tore into his paperwork, which he never did on a Monday morning, especially during an investigation. He left early for his meeting with Consuelo Jimenez.

They started by watching the video of the mourners at the funeral. Sra Jimenez named them all and gave their relationship to her husband. There was no one unusual in the crowd. They reconstructed Raul Jimenez’s last twenty-four hours and then his last week. The meetings, the lunches, the parties, the discussions with builders, a landscape gardener, an air-conditioning engineer. She supplied a list of companies whom they’d dealt with over the last six years — those who’d pitched for business, those who’d failed, those who’d been dropped. It was difficult to believe, after what Ramon Salgado had said, that Raul Jimenez’s only possible enemies were butchers, fishmongers and florists who’d lost business supplying his restaurants. Consuelo Jimenez’s glances at her expensive watch grew more frequent and Falcon moved in with the important question.