people standing around…'

'But who are these guys?' she asked, joining him on her knees, tapping the screen.

They turned to each other and she saw it straight away in the light coming from the trembling image.

'You know something,' she said, blinking. 'What do you know, Javier?'

He couldn't bear to be so close to her. He got to his feet. She came up with him.

'You don't know these men, do you?' she asked. 'You can't know them. How can you know them?'

'I don't know them,' he said. 'But I do know that my work is responsible…'

'Your work. How can your work be responsible? You do your work. You, therefore, are responsible. How?' she asked.

He told her about his meetings with Marisa Moreno and why she was of interest to him. The finding of the disks in the dead Russian mafioso's briefcase. The intensifying of his interrogations of Marisa. The phone calls. The phone call he'd had just before he'd seen her last night.

'So these people are watching you,' she said. 'Which means they've been watching my house, me, my children…'

'That's possible.'

'You knew that,' she said and turned away from him to look out of the black window, the lamp and the two of them reflected back to her, but now transformed in her mind to a scene of gross betrayal.

'I've been threatened before,' he said. 'It's a classic scare tactic, a delaying tactic. It's done to slow me down. To distract.'

'Well, this is a major fucking distraction,' she said, turning on him. 'My son…'

She stopped, something else occurring to her.

'They did the same thing four years ago,' she said. 'I don't know how I could have forgotten that because… how could I forget that?'

She walked away from him and turned back, like a lawyer.

'It was one of the reasons I broke it off with you four years ago,' she said.

'The photograph.'

'The red cross on the photograph,' she said. 'The red marker pen that crossed out my family. People coming into my home, leaving the television on and crossing out my family. That was one of the reasons I couldn't carry on with you the last time. How am I supposed to live with that?'

'You shouldn't have to,' said Falcon.

'They were Russians, too,' she said, eyes fierce, mouth stretched tight across her teeth.

'They were, but a different group. The two men who sanctioned that are now dead.'

'Who killed them?' she asked, finding herself livid now, all logic gone, the stress of the day suddenly releasing itself into her veins, her heart thundering in her chest. 'Or doesn't it matter who killed who? People kill each other all the fucking time. That's who you deal with, Javier – killers. They are your meat and drink.'

'This isn't a good idea,' he said. 'I should go.'

She was on him in a flash, hitting him with both her fists high on his chest, knocking him back against the wall.

'You brought those people into my house the last time,' she said. 'And now, just as I've let you back into my… into everything… they're back.'

He grabbed her wrists. She tore them out of his hands, pummelled him about the head and shoulders until he managed to get hold of them again. He pulled her to him.

'The most important thing for you to understand, Consuelo,' he said, looking into her livid face, 'is that none of this is your fault.'

That turned something in her, switched something off. He didn't like it. The passion disappeared. Her blue eyes turned to ice. She pushed herself away from him, eased herself out of his slackening grip. Backed away into the centre of the room, folded her arms.

'I don't want to see you again,' she said. 'I don't want your world in mine ever again. You are responsible for Dario's abduction and I cannot forgive you. Even if you bring him back to me tomorrow you will never be forgiven for what you have done. I want you to leave and I don't want you ever to come back.'

She turned her back on him. He could see its tense muscularity under the light top and could find no words to soften it. And he realized what this was all about. She was punishing herself. She held herself completely responsible. She had taken her eye off Dario for the sake of some stupid phone call from an idiot estate agent trying to sell her something she didn't want, and that was why he'd been kidnapped. And no amount of his taking the blame on to himself was going to change that. He unlocked the door, left the room, went down the stairs and out into the suffocating night, full of the uneasy susurrating of the trees and the low, distant threat of the city grinding out its future. Cristina Ferrera started at the appearance of Falcon in the frame of the driver's window.

'You told her,' she said, seeing it in his face.

He looked off down Calle Hiniesta and nodded.

'Then I'm glad I didn't call,' she said.

'What's happened?'

'Nothing. The light's on, but I'm not convinced she's there.'

She got out of the car. They looked up at the apartment. Light shone on to the roof terrace, illuminating the plant life growing around it.

'I got here around eleven thirty and I haven't seen anything move.'

'Have you looked at the studio?'

'It's in darkness.'

'Let's call her,' he said, and punched the number into his mobile. No answer.

'Ring the bell?' asked Ferrera.

They crossed the square in front of Santa Isabel, past the bars on Calle Vergara, which at 12.45 a.m. were now shut. Falcon pressed the buzzer. Ferrera stood back in the street.

'I can hear it buzzing,' she said.

'Nobody home.'

'Or too drunk… dead to the world.'

'You didn't leave the lights on when you took her back home and put her to bed?'

'No.'

'Saturday night?'

'She didn't look like she was going anywhere.'

'Let's take a look at the studio,' he said. 'When did you last check it?'

'About half an hour ago.'

They headed down Calle Bustos Tavera and found the arched entrance in profound darkness. They turned on their pen torches and went into the courtyard, where a hot breeze played lazily around the rusted remains of chassis and rejected white goods. Falcon led the way. A dog barked some way off. A torch beam picked up two small discs of reflected light. The cat didn't move until it felt too exposed, and then it turned and shrank away into the shadows. The metal steps up to the studio shook under their weight, the masked window had a crack in it he didn't remember. He reached the landing in front of the door, Ferrera, two steps below. Falcon pushed the door, which gave way. He put the pen torch in his mouth, took out a packet of latex gloves and put them on.

'This doesn't feel right,' he said.

13

Marisa's studio, Calle Bustos Tavera, Seville – Sunday, 17th September 2006, 00.55 hrs

Black and white again, in the torch beam, but this time the real noir. Liquid on the floor, black as an oil spill with a grey flotsam of wood shavings. The work bench's pylon standing in welled crude. A sketch scratched across paper, a bleached square on the lake of tar. A foot, grainy, off-white, creased with grime. Stool on its side, chrome legs, the pitch lagoon sucking up to the silver. Pencils like a barge flotilla broken up in a harbour.

A foot?

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