‘I wish I could be, but I’ve had this condition since I was twelve years old.’
What is the condition?’
‘Retinitis pigmentosa.’
‘I’ve never heard of it,’ said Falcon.
‘I have abnormal pigment cells, which for no definable reason begin to stick together on the retina in clumps,’ she said. ‘The first symptom is night blindness and the last, much later, is complete blindness.’
Javier was paralysed by this exchange. He held on to her hand, which she slowly extracted and showed him to the S-shaped chair.
‘I have to explain a few things about my method,’ she said, sitting next to him but facing him on the specifically designed seat. ‘I cannot see your face clearly and we communicate so much through our faces. As you may know, we are hard-wired for facial recognition at birth. This means that I have to use other ways of registering your feelings. It’s a method similar to a Chinese doctor’s, which relies on pulse. So we sit in this strange seat, you rest your arm in the middle, I hold on to your wrist and you talk. Your voice will be recorded by a tape within the arm. Are you happy with all that?’
Falcon nodded, lulled by the woman’s calm authority, her placid face, her green and unseeing eyes.
‘Part of my method is that I will rarely instigate conversation. The idea is that you talk and I listen. All I may do is to try to direct your thoughts or prompt you if you reach a dead end. I will, however, set you off.’
She turned a switch on the side of the chair that started the tape. She took Falcon’s wrist in an expert but gentle grip.
‘Dr Valera has told me that you’re suffering the symptoms of stress. I can tell that you are anxious now. He says that the change in your mental stability started at the beginning of an investigation into a particularly brutal murder. He has also mentioned your father and your reluctance to be treated by someone who might know your father’s work. Can you think why the first incident should — What was that?’
‘What?’
‘That word, “incident”, it provoked a strong reaction in you.’
‘It’s a word that appears in my father’s journals, which I’ve just started reading. It refers to something that happened when he was sixteen which made him leave home. He never says what it was.’
Now that he’d seen the efficacy of her method he had to suppress his desire to twist his wrist out of her grip. Alicia Aguado not only seemed tuned in to the human anatomy but also to the writhing of its soul.
‘Do you think that was why he wrote his journal?’ she asked.
‘You mean to resolve this “incident”?’ said Falcon. ‘I don’t think that was his intention. I don’t think he would have even started if one of his comrades hadn’t given him a book to write in.’
‘These people are sent sometimes.’
‘Like this killer has been sent to me?’
Silence, while she let that sink in.
‘Everything said in this room is confidential and that includes police information. The tapes are locked in a safe,’ she said. ‘I want you to tell me what started it.’
He told her about Raul Jimenez’s face. How the killer wanted Jimenez to look at something, which he’d refused to do. Falcon spared no detail in the description of how it must have felt to come round with no eyelids and how this, combined with the horror of what the killer was showing, had driven Raul Jimenez to appalling self-mutilation. He believed that his breakdown had started on seeing that face, because in it he saw the pain and terror of someone who had been forced to confront their deepest horrors.
‘Do you think the murderer sees himself in a professional capacity?’ she asked. ‘As a psychologist or psychoanalyst?’
‘Ah!’ said Falcon. ‘You mean do
‘Do you?’
Silence, until Alicia Aguado decided to move things along.
‘Some connection has been made by you between this murder case and your father.’
He told her about the photographs of Tangier he’d found in Raul Jimenez’s study.
‘We lived there too, at the same time,’ he said. ‘I thought I might find my father in the photos.’
‘Was that all?’
Javier flexed his hand, uncomfortable at the information flowing through his wrist.
‘I thought I might find a picture of my mother, too,’ he said. ‘She died in Tangier in 1961 when I was five years old.’
‘Did you find her?’ asked Alicia, after some time.
‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘What I found in the background of one of the shots was my father kissing the woman who eventually became my second mother … I mean, his second wife. The date on the back was before my mother died.’
‘Infidelity is not so unusual,’ she said.
‘My sister would agree with you. She said he was “no angel”.’
‘Has this had an effect on how you see your father?’
Falcon found himself actively thinking. For the first time in his life he was actually searching the narrow cobbled
