The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

'Do you know what time Sr Vega came back home last night?'

'No, but it was rarely before midnight.'

'You wanted to show me something?' he said, turning back in to the room.

On the back wall behind the door, framed in black, was a print 75 cm by 50 cm of a man staring down from a bridge, under which it was clear his whole life was flowing. The features of the man did not compute at first. There was too much going on in the face. It was a shock for him to discover that he was looking at himself – a Javier Falcon he'd never seen before.

Chapter 5

Wednesday, 24th July 2002

Back at the crime scene next door everybody had moved upstairs into the Vegas' bedroom. Calderon had already signed off the levantamiento del cadaver for Sr Vega. The body was in a bag on a trolley in the hallway, waiting in the air conditioning to be loaded on to the ambulance and taken down to the Instituto Anatomico Forense on Avenida Sanchez Pizjuan.

The crime scene team were now congregated around the bed, looking down at Sra Vega, hands behind backs, solemn as if in prayer. The pillow was off her face and had been put in a plastic bag and leaned against the wall. Her mouth was open. The top lip and teeth were set in a snarl as if she'd left life bitterly. Her lower jaw was off centre.

'She'd been hit once with the right hand,' Calderon explained to Falcon. 'The jaw's dislocated… Probably knocked her unconscious. The Medico Forense thinks it was done with the flat of the hand, rather than a closed fist.'

'What was the time of death?'

'Same time as the husband: three, three thirty. He can't be more accurate than that.'

'Sra Jimenez said she used sleeping pills, two a night, to knock herself out. She must have woken up and had to be subdued before being suffocated. Is there any link between this death and Sr Vega's yet?'

'Not until I get them back to the Instituto,' said the Medico Forense.

'We're hoping for some sweat or saliva on the upper side of the pillow,' said Felipe.

'This strengthens your case for an unknown murderer, Inspector Jefe,' said Calderon. 'I can't see a husband dislocating his wife's jaw.'

'Unless, as I said, she woke up, perhaps got out of bed just as Sr Vega came in full of intent. She might have seen something different in him, become hysterical and he felt the need for violence,' said Falcon. 'I'm still keeping an open mind on this. Any ghosts in here'

'Ghosts?' asked Calderon.

'Something that makes a crime scene look 'off', not as it should be,' said Falcon. 'We all had the same feeling about Sr Vega's body in the kitchen. Somebody else had been there.'

'And here?'

Jorge shrugged.

'She was murdered,' said Felipe. 'Nobody was trying to make this scene look like anything else. Whether it was Sr Vega remains to be seen. All we've got is the pillow.'

'What did the neighbours have to say?' asked Calderon, moving away from the others in the room.

'We have some conflicting views,' said Falcon. 'Sra Jimenez has known Sr Vega for some time and did not consider him the suicidal type. She also noted the new car and said he was about to go on holiday to San Diego. Sra Krugman, however, showed me these photographs, taken recently, of Sr Vega in private, clearly distressed and possibly unstable. She let me have this contact sheet.'

Calderon looked over the images, frowning.

'He's barefoot in his garden in January,' said Falcon. 'And there's another one of him crying down by the river.'

'What's she doing, taking these photographs?' asked Calderon.

'It's her work,' said Falcon. 'The way she expresses herself.'

'Taking shots of people's private distress?' said Calderon, raising an eyebrow. 'Is she weird?'

'She told me that she was interested in the private, inner struggle,' said Falcon. 'You know, that voice that Sr Vazquez talked about. The one nobody ever hears.'

'But what's she doing with it?' asked Calderon. 'Recording the face but not the voice… I mean, what's the point?'

'The voice is loud in the head but silent to the outside world,' said Falcon. 'She's interested in the distressed person's need to be out in the open… amongst his fellow strangers, walking his pain out of himself.'

They exchanged a look, left the room and went into Mario's bedroom. Calderon gave him back the contact sheet.

'What's all that bullshit about?' said Calderon.

'I'm telling you what she said.'

'Is she getting some… vicarious experience from this?'

'She's got a photograph of me on her wall,' said Falcon, still seething. 'A blow-up of me staring down into the river from the Puente de Isabel II, for God's sake.'

'She's like some paparazzo of the emotions,' said Calderon, wincing.

'Photographers are strange people,' said Falcon, who was one himself. 'Their currency is perfect moments from real life. They define their idea of perfection to themselves and then pursue it… like prey. If they're lucky they find an image that intensifies their idea, makes it more real… but in the end they're capturing ephemera.'

'Ghosts, internal struggles, captured ephemera…' said Calderon. 'This is unusable stuff.'

'Let's wait for the autopsy. That should give us something tangible to work with. In the meantime I'd like to find Sergei, the gardener, who was physically the closest person to the crime scene and discovered the body.'

'There's another ghost,' said Calderon.

'We should search his rooms down at the bottom of the garden.'

Calderon nodded.

'Maybe I'll go across and take a look at Sra Krugman's photographs while you search the gardener's rooms,' said Calderon. 'I want to see these shots full size.'

Falcon tracked the judge with his eyes back to the second crime scene. Calderon exchanged words with the Medico Forense, rolling his mobile in his hand like a bar of soap. He trotted down the stairs in a hurry. Falcon shrugged away the unsettling thought that

Calderon seemed oddly self-conscious and keen, which was not part of his usual knowing style.

As he sweated his way down the unshaded lawn Falcon noticed a pile of blackened paper in the grill on the paved barbecue area. The uppermost paper had been crumpled and was thoroughly burned so that it disintegrated at the touch of his pen. Beneath it were pages that had not been so completely consumed by fire, on which there was discernible handwriting.

He called Felipe down to the garden with his forensic kit. He looked it over wearing his custom-made magnified goggles.

'We're not going to save much of this,' he said, 'if anything.'

'They look like letters to me,' said Falcon.

'I can only make out partial words, but the writing has that rounded look of a female hand. I'll take a shot of it before we wreck it.'

'Give me the partial words you can see.'

Felipe called out some words which at least confirmed the language as Spanish and he took a couple of shots with his digital camera. The blackened paper collapsed as he dug in deeper with his pen. He found a partial line 'en la escuela' – in the school – but nothing else. At the bottom of the pile he came across paper of a different quality. Felipe lifted some filigree remains from the blackened flakes.

'This is a modern photograph,' he said. 'They're very flammable. The chemicals blister as the paper underneath burns and all that's left is this. Older photographs don't burn so easily. The paper is thicker and higher quality.'