‘Ramon Salgado, but he’s away until the end of the week. I’ve been trying to talk to him since we met at the funeral. He offered me some inside information on Raul Jimenez.’
‘What sort of information?’
‘Untrustworthiness in their exclusive world.’
‘Any reason why he should be believed?’ asked Lobo. ‘He must at the very least be a friend of Raul Jimenez to be on this list.’
‘I have my doubts about him.’
‘And what does this information cost you?’
‘Access to my father’s studio,’ said Falcon, and remembered an exchange with Consuelo Jimenez. ‘They know each other, Salgado and Sra Jimenez. She has been reticent about their relationship. She says they met at one of my father’s evenings, but they might go even further back than that. She was in the art world in Madrid and Salgado circulated in that world, too.’
‘I think you have to speak to Salgado, but face to face,’ said Lobo. ‘And these documents are between us … you understand?’
Lobo made eye contact and slipped the papers into his drawer. Falcon took it as a dismissal.
‘I had no idea how political your appointment would become,’ said Lobo, to the back of Falcon’s head. ‘The forces are ranged against us now. We are smaller but have the advantage of being more intelligent. We must not cross the moral line, though. I hope your arrangement with Salgado is as you say.’
Falcon went straight to the toilet and took an Orfidal with a cupped hand of water.
Eloisa Gomez’s sister, Gloria, looked only marginally older than her sibling, but she had none of her confidence. She sat in the passenger seat, pressed up against the door, arms folded across her chest, as they made their way through the traffic to the Instituto Anatomico Forense. She had a sharp, foxy face that had no small talk in it. She was held in, closed and alone in a world where nobody was to be trusted.
‘Did you know what your sister did for a living?’ asked Falcon.
‘Yes.’
‘Did she talk about it?’ he asked, and Gloria misunderstood.
‘We did the same work … for a while,’ she said. ‘Until I got pregnant.’
‘I meant more recently,’ said Falcon. ‘Did she talk about what was going on in her life?’
Silence. A sideways look told him that he did not have her confidence. He started again.
‘This person who killed Eloisa murdered one of her clients as well. It’s possible he will kill again. We know that Eloisa knew him. He passed himself off as a writer. They became friends and perhaps even something more than that. I think Eloisa had begun to see him as a way out of this life …’
‘He
‘She said his name was … ‘
‘Sergio,’ filled in Gloria.
‘Did she talk about Sergio?’
‘I told her to forget Sergio. I told her he was a fantasy and to be careful of him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he was giving her hope and that makes you see things differently. You start believing in possibilities. You overlook things. You make mistakes.’
‘You were right.’
‘This is what happens when you trust someone —’ she said, and lifted her hair at the neck to show the shiny, fossilized skin of a serious burn. ‘It goes all the way down my back.’
‘So you got out?’
‘I had a choice: the work or poverty. I chose poverty over pain and death.’
‘But this didn’t persuade Eloisa?’
‘Nothing had ever happened to her,’ said Gloria. ‘A knife had been pulled on her, sure. Somebody pointed a gun at her head once. She’d been slapped around, but she didn’t carry any scars. I knew, though, as soon as she started talking about Sergio, that he’d singled her out.’
She unfolded her arms and they hung limp at her sides as if she was utterly defeated by life, as if all there was to add to the sum total of her experiences was the guilt of the survivor.
‘What did she tell you about Sergio?’ he asked, before she sank without trace.
‘She said he was guapo. They’re always guapo. She said he was like us.’
‘Like
‘Eloisa and I used to call ourselves
‘And what made her say that?’
‘Everything she said about him made
