‘She’s tough,’ said Falcon, ‘and I don’t think we’ve got enough on her to make her feel even slightly uncomfortable. We’re going to have to dig.’
‘What about surveillance?’ asked Ramirez.
‘I can’t justify that sort of expense yet,’ said Falcon. ‘I’d need more on her. The lover motive is dead and the Joaquin Lopez motive still isn’t strong enough, although it’s worth running it past Juez Calderon.’
‘Sr Lopez has offered his help in any way.’
‘I’m sure he has.’
‘What if they find something in Madrid … will you put her under surveillance then?’
‘If she’s been implicated in murder before, then yes. If it’s shoplifting, no.’
‘To really nail her we have to show a connection between her and the cameraman in the graveyard,’ said Perez, which didn’t advance the conversation.
‘What was he doing there? Ask yourself that first,’ said Falcon. ‘His job was done. If he’s operating under instructions, why film the funeral?’
‘Maybe he’s been making a little blackmail movie,’ said Perez.
‘That is stretching credibility, Sub Inspector.’
‘Is the disappearance of Eloisa Gomez stretching credibility, too?’ asked Ramirez. ‘The wife saw her on that video we were watching after they’d taken the body away.’
‘I think that’s something between the killer and Eloisa …’
‘The wife might not have liked the idea of an accomplice out there,’ said Perez.
‘Think about why he’s playing these games with Eloisa Gomez’s mobile phone,’ said Falcon. ‘Why say that line about having a story to tell?’
‘What line was that?’ asked Ramirez.
‘I told you.’
‘You told us about “Are we close?” and “Closer than you think”, said Ramirez, ‘but “a story to tell” — no, you didn’t mention that.’
Falcon was amazed and embarrassed. It worried him that his memory was so shot through with holes. The brandy. He told them what had happened out on the bridge.
‘It’s a distraction,’ said Ramirez.
‘Insane,’ said Perez.
‘It’s obscure on its own, but taken in conjunction with the man appearing at the funeral with his camera it could mean that he’s going to act again,’ said Falcon. ‘We have to keep an open mind. We can’t close down any possibilities to concentrate solely on Consuelo Jimenez.’
Ramirez started some agitated pacing around the room. Falcon dismissed the two men but called Perez back.
‘I want you to do a couple of things with these lists,’ said Falcon. ‘Take the first two you gave me and find out which of those companies still exist. Then find all the names of the directors, executive and non-executive, in all these companies between 1990 and 1992. That’s all, then we drop it.’
16
Falcon couldn’t stand to be alone, which for a private man was a bizarre revelation. As soon as Perez left the office he became anxious, frightened that something would happen in his head. He couldn’t rely on himself. He felt like an old person who’d noticed the first signs of dementia — moments of confusion, memory lapses, the inability to recognize simple things — and sensed the imminent free fall to total dislocation from life. Other people gave him context, reminded him of his old confidence. He couldn’t concentrate on the report from the Policia Cientifica. Panic rose in his chest and he had to walk it back down.
He became so desperate at the thought of his loneliness after work, the survival of a whole night before his doctor’s appointment, that he called the British Institute and reintroduced himself into the conversational English classes he had enrolled in the year before and failed to attend. This was how he found himself sitting in the middle of a class in a state of appalled fascination as the Scottish teacher told the students about some recent laser treatment on her eyes. Lasers in the eye? He couldn’t even think about it.
After class he went out for a drink and tapas with some of the other students. He found strangers comforting. They didn’t know him. They couldn’t judge his own strangeness. He would have to avoid his sister, her friends. This was his new life and that was how he thought of it already after only a few days.
He got home at 1 a.m., exhausted. It was a tiredness he’d never encountered before. A deep structural fatigue, like an ancient bridge that had shouldered epochs of traffic and strained against relentless tons of water. His legs quivered, his joints creaked and yet inside his head, whoever it was inside his head, was as alert as a night animal. He hauled himself up to the bedroom like a butcher’s boy with a carcass on his back.
The sheets were as cool as lotion as he crawled naked into bed for the first time since he was a boy. His eyelids rolled shut, heavy as boulders.
And still sleep did not come.
Ghastly images surfaced. Horror faces that were inconceivable except, there they were, in his mind. Every time his brain keeled over into the dark, they came and jolted him back. He writhed in the sheets, turned the light on, jammed his fists into his eyes. He wouldn’t have minded tearing them out if he could have guaranteed to blind the mind’s eye, too. The mind’s eye. He hated that expression. His father had hated it. That’s why
