stored, so if somebody had opened them it would be obvious. Raul Jimenez’s cases were amongst the oldest pieces stored in the warehouse. All Mudanzas Triana personnel had access to the warehouse but only the warehouse manager had the keys to the storage cages. Nobody could access the cages without him being present. The keys were kept in a locked safe in his office. The warehouse was patrolled at night by two security guards with dogs. In the last forty years there had been four reported break-ins with nothing significant stolen as each break-in had been interrupted.
Falcon was glad that Perez sat in on the session to react to the brunt of Ramirez’s comments. He hadn’t expected to become so emotionally engaged by the black-and-white flickering images of Raul Jimenez’s earlier and happier life. Never before, in the dark of the cinema, had he been so moved. Fiction hadn’t been able to do this to him. He’d always seen through the contrivance, withdrawn from the imperative engagement and never shed a single sentimental tear.
Now, having come to know the protagonists in the most personal way, he watched in the darkness as Jose Manuel and Marta played on the beach while the uncomplicated waves folded on to the shore. Raul’s wife, Gumersinda, walked into frame, turned and held out her arms. Running after her into the frame came the toddling Arturo. He reached her outstretched arms and she clasped his small chest in her hands and lifted him high above her head, so that his legs dangled and he looked down on her smiling face with pure and wild delight. As the toddler was taken skywards Falcon’s stomach flipped. He remembered that feeling and had to pinch at the tears, shudder under the weight of the tragedy that had torn this family apart.
He couldn’t understand his emotional intensity over this family. He’d come into contact with other families ravaged by murder or rape, drug addiction or extreme violence. Why was the Jimenez family so different? He had to talk about this before his desperation turned from leaking to free flow. Alicia Aguado … would she work?
The lights came up in the room. Ramirez and Perez turned in their chairs to look at their superior.
‘There’s reels of this stuff,’ said Ramirez. ‘What exactly are we doing here, Inspector Jefe?’
We’re adding to the profile of our killer,’ he said. ‘We have a physical idea of him from the blow-ups we’ve taken from the video shot in the cemetery. We have been told he is guapo and he has beautiful hands. Physically he is taking shape. Mentally: we’ve talked about his creativity and his playfulness. We know he is interested in film. We know that he has made a study of the Jimenez family … ‘
He found himself drying up. Why were they looking at these movies?
‘The box in which these films were stored was sealed,’ said Perez, reiterating his report. ‘These canisters haven’t seen the light of day since they were put in there.’
‘But what a day that was,’ said Falcon, like a drowning man clutching at passing reeds. ‘The day he expunged his youngest son’s memory from his mind.’
‘But what does it add to the profile?’ asked Ramirez.
‘I was thinking of those terrible self-inflicted injuries,’ said Falcon. ‘Before Jimenez did that to himself he was refusing to watch something on the television. Then he had his eyelids cut off and what did he see? What would have induced Raul Jimenez to do that to himself?’
‘If somebody cut my eyelids off … ‘ started Perez.
‘You saw the boy, the tiny helpless boy,’ said Falcon. ‘You heard him shrieking and whooping in his mother’s arms … Don’t you think …?’
He stopped. The two men were looking hard at him, their faces blank and uncomprehending.
‘But, Inspector Jefe,’ said Perez, ‘there was no soundtrack.’
‘I know, Sub-Inspector … ‘ started Falcon, but he hadn’t known and his mind was suddenly shot through with a colourless panic and he couldn’t even remember his colleague’s name. He couldn’t think of another word to follow the one he’d just said. He’d become the dried actor he most feared: the one playing himself in his own life.
He came to as if the bubble he’d been encased in had burst and real life had streamed back up to him again. The men had moved away and were dismantling the screen. Falcon was surprised to find it close to 9 p.m. He had to get out, but he had a need to salvage something from this situation first. He went to the door.
‘You file the report on these films, Sub-Inspector … ‘ he said, that name still eluding him. ‘And when you do it I want you to use your imagination. I want you to think about who was holding the camera and the mental state of the man at the time.’
‘Yes, Inspector Jefe,’ said Perez. ‘But you’ve always told me to report the facts and not attempt to interpret them.’
‘Do your best,’ he said and left.
He tried to dry swallow an Orfidal, but it got stuck in the clag of his mouth and he had to go to the bathroom and scoop water to his lips and over his hot face. He dabbed himself dry and found he didn’t recognize his own eyes in the mirror. They were somebody else’s, these pink-rimmed, filmy things, sunken in their sockets, flinching in his skull. He was losing his authority. Nobody would respect these eyes.
He got out of the Jefatura into the cool night air, drove back home and walked to Dra Alicia Aguado’s small house in Calle Vidrio, arriving there shortly before his 10 p.m. appointment. He paced the pavement outside the newly renovated house, nervous as an actor before an audition, until he couldn’t stand it any longer and rang the bell. She let him in and called him up a dark stairway to the light.
In the consulting room Falcon noticed that there was nothing on the light-blue walls and no bric-a-brac. In fact, the only furniture was a sofa and a double seat in the shape of an ‘S’.
The room was narrow, the house feeling small and contained, making his own place seem absurd. It was clearly a well-managed and comfortable head to reside in. Whereas his own sprawling, multi-roomed, cavernous, storeyed, balconied, baroque, Byzantine madness was like a boarded-up asylum, where a single inmate had hidden until it had all gone quiet …
Alicia Aguado had short black hair, a pale face and no trace of make-up. She held out her hand but did not look directly at him. As their hands touched she said:
‘Dr Valera didn’t tell you I was partially sighted,’ she said.
‘He only guaranteed that you would not be interested in art.’
