had impeccable manners, superb conversational skills, perfect tailoring, precision coiffure and gold-rimmed half- moon spectacles which hung from his neck by a cord. You would be in no doubt, just from the look of him, that this man came from lengthy and outstanding lineage, but that he would be the last person in the world to tell you anything of the sort.
Although Falcon had known Jose Manuel Domecq for many years, he had not seen him this century. They sat in an office at the back of the gallery, where Domecq had led him after a genuinely warm welcome. Two small coffees were brought in. Domecq shook the sugar sachet empty over his and stirred it in for a length of time for which only an old man would have the patience.
'I know you don't have anything left of your father's to sell, Javier,' he said. 'I heard you burnt it all.'
'Under his orders.'
'Yes, yes, yes,' he said sadly. 'A travesty and a tragedy. So what brings you here?'
'I just wanted to know if you've ever seen this woman,' said Falcon, handing Domecq a photograph he'd printed off his computer after his meeting with Lobo and Elvira.
Domecq settled his specs on his nose and leaned forward to inspect.
'She's very lovely, Marisa, isn't she?' he said.
'Did you know her well?'
'She came in here asking me to represent her once, but, you know, wood carving, ethnic stuff, it's not really my thing,' he said. 'But she was very attractive so I asked her to some openings, and sometimes she came and lent a somewhat exotic atmosphere to the proceedings. A mango amongst the oranges, or rather, a leopard amongst the… er… reptiles might be a more accurate description of some of my collectors. They liked her, found her rather interesting.'
'About what?' asked Falcon, thinking some of those words and phrases had sounded very familiar.
'The work,' said Domecq. 'Although I didn't like her stuff, she knew how to talk about art.'
'When did you last see her?'
'Not for a while at an opening,' said Domecq. 'But she didn't live far from here, so she'd drop in every so often to say hello. I probably saw her three or four months ago.'
'That's very good, Jose Manuel. Thank you for that,' said Falcon, taking the photograph back.
Some minutes later Falcon walked back to the tree-lined, leafy square, got into his car and sat at the wheel with the photograph still in his hands. The Plaza Alfalfa was quiet, the heat too oppressive for anybody to be sitting outside the Bar Manolo. The captivating woman in the photo stared back at him with dark, wide eyes. Domecq was right, she was lovely; but it was a picture of the American actress Halle Berry he'd shown to the gallery owner, not Marisa Moreno.
It was clear that Alejandro Spinola had moved fast. First, getting his father to complain to Comisario Lobo, of all people. Changing the story only a little so that it had come out as Falcon 'interrupting a press conference' just to talk about Calderon's old girlfriend. That could be construed as 'unstable behaviour'. And now, here he was, covering his tracks at La Galeria Zoca. Domecq must have a need for Spinola's social and professional network to have to lie for him like that.
His mobile vibrated. Cristina Ferrera.
'Diga,' he said.
'My friend in the CGI just came back to me,' she said. 'I thought you might be interested to know that Charles Taggart is booked to fly into Madrid from Newark tonight. Antonio Ramos is flying in from Barcelona, also tonight. And, this is the interesting thing: I4IT has chartered a private jet to fly down to Seville tomorrow. The pilot has logged his flight plan with a take-off time of five p.m.'
'Are they staying the night or flying back?'
'The pilot's flight plan indicates a take-off time of eleven a.m. on Wednesday, 20th September, destination Malaga, which meant that my friend, being a very thorough person, checked all the upmarket hotels in and around Seville and found four suites booked in the company name of Horizonte at an exclusive country-house hotel called La Berenjena, which is just off the road to Huelva.'
'Four suites?'
'There must be someone else invited to the party.'
'That's a pretty good contact you've got at the CGI,' said Falcon. 'You might have to marry him for doing all that for you.'
'My friend is a 'she',' said Ferrera. 'You don't think you'd get that kind of detail from a man, do you, Inspector Jefe?' There were too many people for the meeting to take place in the judge's offices, so they'd had to wait half an hour for the conference room in the Edificio de los Juzgados to come available. At the end of the table sat the instructing judge, Anibal Parrado. To his left were Sub-Inspector Emilio Perez, Vicente Cortes and Martin Diaz. Opposite them sat Falcon and Ramirez. Falcon introduced Cortes and Diaz, whom the judge hadn't met before. He then gave an introduction to the three murders they were about to discuss and sat down. Anibal Parrado asked for an update on developments in the Marisa Moreno case. Ramirez described the sighting of three men down Calle Bustos Tavera by the young female witness. His description of the third man as a bodybuilder earned an interruption from Cortes.
'You mean a weightlifter,' he said.
'You know someone built like that?' asked Falcon. 'Because I have a witness from Las Tres Mil, Carlos Puerta, who gave a similar description of the possible shooter in El Pulmon's apartment.'
'Nikita Sokolov,' said Cortes. 'Just missed out on a bronze medal at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, middleweight class, which means around seventy kilos, although he must be heavier than that by now, but certainly no taller, and he still trains. We haven't seen him in the Costa del Sol for a few months… not since May or June.'
'What did he do down there?'
'He was an enforcer. When the old Russian gang leader fled to Dubai after Operation Wasp, he carried on working for Leonid Revnik,' said Cortes. 'His job was to make people pay or perform and, if they didn't want to do either, he'd kill them. I'll get back to you with more information on him.'
'A photo would help,' said Juez Parrado. 'Only one witness in the Marisa Moreno investigation, Inspector Ramirez?'
'There's not much residential around there. The courtyard was closed off from the street. The chain saw was electric and therefore quiet. It was pure luck that we found this witness.'
'Forensic information?'
'We found two paper suits in some rubbish bins around the corner, just off Calle Gerona. They were in a bin liner, which is what our witness described seeing in the hands of one of the three men she saw in Calle Bustos Tavera. The blood on the suits was matched to Marisa Moreno and some DNA has been derived from hairs found on the inside of one and from a semen deposit in the other. The data has been passed to CICO headquarters in Madrid to see if they can find a match on their database.'
'That could take some time,' said Diaz. 'Computer matches have to be confirmed by human inspection these days. We'll be lucky to have anything on that by tomorrow, if they exist in our database. If they don't, we have to pass the samples over to Interpol and that might take weeks.'
'So we have a sighting of three men, but DNA from only two,' said Parrado.
'Nikita Sokolov wouldn't do dirty work like that,' said Cortes. 'He'd shoot a guy, but he wouldn't get actively involved in cutting up a woman. He wouldn't lower himself to that.'
'Lower himself?' asked Parrado.
'These guys keep male company. Women, to them, are a lower form of life. They're good for preparing food, sex and beating. Sokolov is a real vor-v-zakone, which means 'a thief with a code of honour'. When he came back from the Olympics he served time in jail for murder. Most of the Russian mafia guys on the Costa del Sol these days have just bought the right to be vory-v-zakone, but Sokolov actually earned it in jail. He would have overseen Marisa's killing, but he wouldn't have done the work.'
'Do we have Sokolov's DNA on file?' asked Juez Parrado.
'That's what I'm not sure about,' said Cortes. 'I wasn't involved in the case, but I think Sokolov and this guy who was killed on the motorway, Vasili Lukyanov, were friends and they were both being processed as a result of an assault on a local girl. Blood samples would have been taken for DNA purposes, prior to the girl dropping the charges and the men being released. I'll check with the Sex Crimes squad in Malaga to see if they've still got them.'
