The Blind Man of Seville

nobody except the sister in Cadiz. He roamed their faces. They had the look of refugees about them. Refugees from life, stuck on the borders of civilization, remote from comfort. He told them they could leave. The fat girl remained.

‘There was somebody,’ she said, once they’d all left. ‘Not a regular, but she saw him more than once. She said he was different.’

‘Why didn’t you mention this before?’ asked Falcon.

‘Because I thought she’d got away. That’s what she said she was going to do.’

‘Start from the beginning,’ said Falcon.

‘She said he didn’t want to have sex with her. He only wanted to talk.’

‘One of those,’ said Ramirez, and Falcon stabbed him silent with a look.

‘He told her he was a writer. He was doing something for a film.’

‘What did they talk about?’

‘He asked her everything about her life. There was no detail he wasn’t interested in. He was particularly interested in what he called “crossing borders”.’

‘Do you know what he meant by that?’

‘The first time she had sex. The first time she had sex for money. The first time she permitted certain things to be done to her. The first time she got pregnant. The first abortion. The first time she was hit. The first time a man pulled a knife on her. The first time a man pushed a gun into her … cut her. Those borders.’

‘And they only talked?’

‘He paid her for sex but they only talked,’ she said. ‘And by the end they just talked.’

‘Did she say what he looked like?’ asked Falcon. ‘Where he was from? How he spoke? Did he have a name?’

‘She called him Sergio.’

‘Was it him she went to see on Friday night?’

She shrugged.

‘Did you ever see him?’

She shook her head.

‘She must have described him.’

‘We’re careful what we tell each other … it can come back on us,’ she said. ‘She only told me that he was guapo. Maybe she talked to her sister more.’

‘So you think, if she was going to run away with him, that she had feelings for him?’

‘She said that no man had ever spoken to her like he did.’

‘Did he talk about himself to her?’

‘If he did, she didn’t tell me anything.’

‘What do you know about Sergio … other than a name?’

‘I know that he’d done a very dangerous thing,’ she said. ‘He’d given Eloisa hope.’

‘Hope?’ said Ramirez, as if this had no weight with him at all.

‘Look around you,’ said the fat girl. ‘Imagine what hope does to you, if you live like this.’

Falcon and Ramirez were back at the Jefatura by 8 p.m. having searched and sealed off Eloisa Gomez’s room. They’d found nothing. They went through the address book on Eloisa’s retrieved mobile and found no reference to Sergio. Falcon left Ramirez with the paperwork while he went to Tabladilla to keep his appointment with the psychologist. He parked across the street from the building and paced up and down the length of his car, eyeing the plaques on the outside of the door, reluctant to initiate the consultation.

A memory of his father getting mechanics to tinker about inside the engine of the Jaguar, even when it was working perfectly, came back to him. He always said it was “just in case something was about to go wrong”. Madness. The point was that Falcon did need some tinkering, but what would happen? What terrible black thread would be teased out of his tightknit brain? Would it all unravel? He saw himself dazed and slack-jawed, staring up at two white-coated assistants as they eased his arms into a surgical gown. Just one small cut and you’ll be set adrift from your past. He was already out of control, he saw that, thinking about open brain surgery when all this was going to be was a talk. He wiped his damp palms together, sandwiched a handkerchief between them and crossed the street.

The stairs were either interminable or he was making them so and he had to drive himself through the door at the top. A girl sat behind a desk.

‘Hola, Sr Falcon,’ she said, cheerful, used to dealing with broken minds. ‘This is your first time, isn’t it?’

She had blonde hair and thick pouting lips. She held out a form for him to fill in. He didn’t take it. On the wall beyond the girl was one of his father’s paintings of the doorway to the Iglesia Omnium Santorum. Checking the room he found another — one of the larger, less successful abstract landscapes.

‘Sr Falcon,’ said the girl, standing now, skirt hem at the level of the desk.

He knew he would not be able to stand this. He would not be able to sit in front of someone and discuss his father’s life and work and have the man nosing about inside his head, looking for the crimps and creases in the texture of his thoughts and ironing them out. He left without a word. It was the easiest thing he’d done in years. He just walked away.