Falcon contemplated the binary tracks of the human brain, the endless choices. This way or that? What was driving the instinct to always choose the wrong way, so that instead of lying in bed with your wife, reflecting on the joy of marriage and children, you find yourself screwing a whore in your study while looking at your wife performing on the screen? Raul Jimenez had an instinct for worthlessness.
‘If you take into consideration the likeness of Consuelo Jimenez to the dead wife … it’s almost impossible to imagine what was going on in the man’s head,’ said Falcon.
‘Guilt,’ said Ramirez.
‘Guilt requires perception.’
‘Beats me,’ said Ramirez, easily bored. ‘What are we going to do with this?’
‘Confront Consuelo Jimenez with it … see how she reacts.’
‘I’m game for that.’
‘We’re also due to meet Juez Calderon before lunch,’ said Falcon. ‘I don’t think two policemen leaning on Consuelo Jimenez about her unfortunate past is going to be productive. I want you to prepare the material for the meeting with Juez Calderon. You could also tell Baena, if he’s still down at Mudanzas Triana, to see if they’ll let him have a look at Raul Jimenez’s stuff or at least give him an inventory.’
Ramirez’s colour darkened with some tight internal rage. He didn’t like having his machinations turned on him and he didn’t want to be excluded from the humiliation of Consuelo Jimenez. Falcon called her. She agreed to see him and asked him to come before lunch was served in the restaurants.
He took another Orfidal in the toilet, amazed at how effective the first had been, tempted to spend the rest of his life on them. He drove through the subdued city and thought that his doctor might be right, that this was just stress. We live in an age of constant mild anxiety. Because there are no longer any defining events of world upheaval we focus our concentration on the minutiae of everyday life, engross ourselves in work and activity to suppress the anxiety that goes with relative peace. Yes, that’s it, he thought, I’ll take these pills for a few more weeks, crack this case and take a holiday.
There were a couple of spaces at the back of the Edificio de los Juzgados. He parked up and set off through the Jardines de Murillo into the barrio de Santa Cruz. He slowed down as the doctor’s words came back to him … the most beautiful city in Spain … and he looked around himself as if for the first time. The sky overhead beyond the clear, rinsed air and the high palms was nothing short of cerulean. The Andalucian sun shone above the green leaves of the plane trees casting patterns of light and shade on the smooth cobbles below. Towers of magenta bou-gainvillea, spectacular after the rains, tumbled down the white and ochre buildings. The bright blood-red of geraniums nodded through the black balustrades of the wrought-iron balconies. The smell of coffee and baking bread loafed in the quiet streets. The cavernous cool of narrow alleyways broke out into the warmth of open squares where the golden stone of ancient churches settled in silence.
He walked under the high plane trees of the Plaza Alfalfa and regretted the business that he was on — the pain and the embarrassment at odds with the full flush of the day. The secretary showed him in to Consuelo Jimenez’s office. She sat right up to the desk, with her hands flat on the leather inlay, padded shoulders braced. Falcon sank into a chair, his stomach still fluttering with gaiety. These pills. Like a man listening to his favourite music under headphones he had to stop himself from roaring it out.
He handed her the video cassette in a plastic evidence bag. She turned it over and flinched at the title. He told her he’d received it in the post that morning and about the sight lesson card.
‘This is one of my husband’s dirty movies, isn’t it?’
‘It was playing while the killer filmed your husband having sex with the prostitute in his study. The card accompanying it told us to look at sections four and six very closely.’
‘Very good, Inspector Jefe, and what happened?’
‘You have no idea of the contents of this video?’
‘I’m not interested in pornography. I abhor it.’
‘From the clothes of the actors and actresses in this film we estimate it to be about twenty years old.’
‘Only initially.’
‘Come on, Inspector Jefe, if there’s been a development then let’s have it out and talk it over.’
‘The two sections we were instructed to view by the sight lesson card feature you, Sra Jimenez, as a young woman.’
Silence. Long enough for a new ice age to have formed.
‘Why do you think …?’ started Falcon.
The vicious edge to her voice shredded his confidence and the possibility loomed in his mind that they had been mistaken, that Ramirez had misjudged, that it hadn’t been her and the furniture in the office was rushing past him as he crashed headlong into the most embarrassing moment of his professional career.
‘I was wondering,’ he said, steadying himself, ‘why anybody would want to send us this film.’
‘Why do you think you can come into my office with this disgusting notion …?’
‘Do you have a video player?’
‘Come with me,’ she said, snatching up the bag.
They left the office and went down the corridor to a small room with a two-seater sofa, a chair and a TV/Video. Falcon struggled into a latex glove with his hands now running with sweat. The film was preset to start at the fourth section. He decided to avoid maximum embarrassment by just playing the first moments where the four people are let into the apartment. He froze the frame on her as she came in the door. She scoffed at it, holding her blonde hair out to him. He let the video play on until the camera closed in on her unmistakable face. He tried to freeze the frame but the video would not obey. The young Consuelo unzipped the man’s trousers and fished out his
