The Blind Man of Seville

penis and that was when Consuelo Jimenez, puce in the face, barged him out of the way, stopped the video, and tore it out of the player.

‘That is evidence,’ said Falcon.

She smashed the cassette to the ground, impaled it with her heel. The plastic casing cracked and she tried to shake it off but it was as tenacious as dog shit. She kicked her shoe off, ripped the cassette off the heel and dashed it against the wall where it splintered and fell into pieces. Falcon rushed at it with the evidence bag and shovelled in the remains. She was on him, hitting him about the head and back, screaming and livid, the language worse than he’d heard even in the drug dens of the Poligono San Pablo. He turned on her, grabbed her by the shoulders, shouted into her face and she broke down on his shoulder and wept into the material of his suit.

He sat her down on the sofa. She buried her face in the arm. Falcon’s mind split into two worlds; was this pretence or real? She came round slowly, face destroyed. He sat in the chair to distance himself.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that was me.’

‘A hard time?’

‘A very bad moment,’ she said, reducing the hours it must have taken to a flashing fraction.

‘Money problems?’

‘Everything problems,’ she said, staring into the abyss of the inevitability of intrusion. ‘I volunteered the details of my second abortion, paid for by my lover. This was the prelude to my first abortion, financed by me. Return flight to London, hotel and hospital. It was a lot of money to raise in two months without any help.’

She shuddered, put her hand to her mouth as if she might be sick.

‘It’s not the kind of thing anybody would want to have to remember,’ she said. ‘That a pregnant woman had to do that sort of thing to earn the money to terminate a foetus. It’s just completely disgusting to me.’

This was a big lesson, this Sight Lesson No.1. Perhaps it would have been good for Ramirez to have seen this, because this fits with the profile of the killer. He knows things. He finds the shame or the horror in people’s pasts and shows it to them, forces them to relive it.

‘How would anybody know about this?’ asked Falcon. ‘Did anybody know about it?’

‘I’d already edited it out of my own life. I can’t remember a thing about it. I did something that had to be done and when it was over I dispatched it to the deepest abyss. I can barely remember who I knew at that time. I came back from London and set about changing everything.’

‘The father?’

‘You mean the man who did not become a father,’ she said. ‘He was a mechanic at a garage my father managed. When I told him, he ran. I never saw him again.’

‘How would anybody know about this?’

‘They wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘It was the first time in my life I’d encountered true loneliness. I did everything on my own. I didn’t even tell my sister.’

‘How did you find the clinic in London?’ he asked, the sordid checking of the facts inevitable.

‘My doctor gave me an address in Madrid of a woman who had all the details.’

‘And raising the money … how did you find yourself in that world?’

‘They were people who knew about that address, too,’ she said. ‘It was no coincidence that I should meet a girl in a cafe on the same afternoon, who made a proposal to me that would supply precisely the right amount of money.’

‘Did you see her again?’

‘Never.’

‘And the other performers?’ he asked, and she shook her head.

‘You know, given the racket they were involved in, they were surprisingly good people. What we were doing was depraved and the atmosphere on the set should have been horrible, but we smoked a few joints and it was all very friendly. They were humane and sympathetic. I was probably lucky. I’ve met more abusive people in the restaurant business. And the sex … the sex was really nothing. The most difficult thing was for the men to maintain an erection because it was all so uncharged … unsexy.’

Falcon squirmed as the question he didn’t want to ask formed in his head. He shelved it. Too distasteful.

‘You said you changed everything when you came back to Spain.’

‘The night before the operation I was staying in a cheap hotel in Victoria. I went walking to take my mind off the next day. I wanted to lose myself. I went up to Hyde Park Corner, down Piccadilly into Shepherd’s Market and Berkeley Square. I drifted into Albemarle Street and found myself outside an art gallery. There was an opening of an exhibition. I watched the people as they came and left. They were beautifully dressed, sophisticated and completely urbane. None of those women would have got themselves pregnant by a garage mechanic. I decided that they were my people and I would consort with them and become them.

‘When I got back to Madrid I worked hard and bought some nice clothes and went to see a gallery owner who said I was unsuitable, that I didn’t know the first thing about art. He humiliated me. He took me around the paintings and let me reveal my ignorance. Then he asked me about the frames. Frames? What did I care about frames? He told me to learn how to type and threw me out.’

She was mesmerizing Falcon, fixing him with a look of pure grit. Her fist was balled on the arm of the chair, just as it had been in the film.

‘I studied art history. Not formally — I couldn’t afford that. I worked at it in my spare time. I went to meet frame makers. I met artists, unknowns, but ones who knew what they were talking about. I worked in a shop selling art materials. I learnt everything. I met more established artists … and that was how I got the job in the gallery. And when I got it I went back to the guy who turned me down. He didn’t remember me. While we were talking Manolo Rivera came in … do you know him?’