The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

'She had a picture of her and the child just after the birth on her bedside table. She looks fantastic – radiant, beautiful and proud. I think it's a photograph she looked at a lot. It reminded her of the woman she used to be.'

'Postnatal depression?'

'Could be,' said Ferrera. 'She didn't go out much. There's stacks of mail-order catalogues under the bed.'

'She let the child sleep over at a neighbour's house quite often.'

'Difficult to cope when your life runs away from you like that,' said Ferrera, her eyes dropping to the lipstick- smeared coffee cup. 'Was she that neighbour?'

'No, another one,' said Falcon, shaking his head.

'She didn't look the mothering type.'

'So what do you think happened here?' asked Falcon.

'There's enough despair in this house to lead you to believe that having decided to kill himself he would have had to kill her to put her out of her misery.'

'Why did he dislocate her jaw?'

'To knock her out?'

'Doesn't that seem too violent? She was probably groggy with sleep anyway.'

'Perhaps he did it as a way of finding the violence in himself,' said Ferrera.

'Or perhaps she heard the death agonies of her husband and surprised the murderer, who then had to deal with her,' said Falcon.

'Where's the pad Sr Vega wrote his note on?'

'Good question. It hasn't been found. But it's possible that it was an old piece of paper he had in his dressing- gown pocket.'

'Who bought the drain cleaner?'

'Not the maid,' said Falcon.

'Do we know when it was bought?'

'Not yet, but if it was from a supermarket it won't be much help.'

'It looks as if Sra Vega was on her own that night, indulging herself as usual,' said Ferrera. 'She spends a lot of time on her own and she's well prepared for it.'

'You're always on your own with mental illness,' said Falcon.

'She has a box of her favourite videos and DVDs. All romantic stuff. There's a DVD still in the machine. She gets the call from her neighbour so the child is taken care of. She has no responsibilities. When did her husband get home?'

'I'm told it was normally quite late… around midnight.'

'That would fit: put off coming home to the despair for as long as possible,' said Ferrera. 'Sra Vega probably didn't like seeing him anyway. She heard the car… or maybe not through these windows. So she more likely heard him come into the house from the garage. She turned off the DVD and ran upstairs leaving her slippers. He eventually joined her in bed, or at least…'

'How do you know he joined her? His pillow was undented in the crime scene shots.'

'But the sheets and covers were pulled out… so he might have been about to join her…'

'And then been distracted by something else.'

'Do we know from the phone company if there were any more calls after the neighbour rang about the child?'

'Not yet. You can work on that when we get back.'

'The only other oddity I've come across is that in the crime scene photographs he's got his watch on with the face on the outside of his wrist, but in the photos I've seen elsewhere in the house he always wore it with the face on the underside of his wrist.'

'What do you conclude from that?'

'It either worked its way round in his struggle with himself or an assailant,' said Ferrera, 'or the watch has come off and been put back on his wrist by somebody who doesn't know how he wears it.'

'Why would someone want to do that?'

'Well… if it came off as a result of a struggle with an assailant whose ultimate aim was to make this look like a suicide it would be less indicative of another person's presence if the watch was on his wrist rather than on the floor.'

'What sort of a strap did his watch have?'

'It seems to be a metal bracelet type, which can come off easily in a struggle or just as easily work its way round a wrist, so

'Whatever… that was a good piece of observation,' said Falcon. 'It might not help us form a case for murder, but it is indicative of the strange circumstances of the crime scene. Now all we've got to do is find the incontrovertible proof that will convince Juez Calderon that we have a case. We know Sr Vega was burning things at the bottom of the garden. What does that imply to you?'

'He was getting rid of things in preparation for something.'

'They were personal things, letters and photographs, and they caused him great distress.'

'So he didn't want them discovered. He was hiding them and now…'

'If you were Sr Vega and you wanted to hide something, where would you put it?'

'In my territory – either here in my study or in the butcher's room.'

'I've searched the study,' said Falcon.

They went into the butcher's room. Ferrera turned on the harsh neon lights and Falcon walked around the wooden chopping block putting on latex gloves. They opened up the first freezer cabinet and he started taking out the blocks of meat. When all the meat was out of the cabinets Ferrera crawled into the dark frozen holes with a pen torch in her mouth and a knife to scrape away at the frost on the sides of the freezers. At the back in a corner of the second freezer she found what they were looking for. A plastic package encrusted in ice. She passed it out. They returned the meat to the cabinets.

The package was a small freezer bag with a wire twist at its neck. Inside was an Argentinian passport issued in Buenos Aires in May 2000 in the name of

Emilio Cruz. The photo was of Rafael Vega in a pair of old-fashioned heavy-framed glasses. There was also a single key with no label.

This was an escape route,' said Falcon. 'What are the implications of that?'

'Well, if he had an escape route into the life of Emilio Cruz,' said Ferrera, 'then he'd probably already escaped into the life of Rafael Vega.'

'So we now check Vega's ID card right back to its original issuing office,' said Falcon.

Chapter 8

Thursday, 25th July 2002

In Consuelo Jimenez's office they sorted through her husband's old photos, finding ones that included Pablo Ortega and/or Rafael Vega. They headed out of the old city to Dr Rodriguez's surgery, which was in a barrio next to Nervion. On the way the Medico Forense called Falcon to say that the autopsies were complete and both bodies ready for identification. Ferrera called Carmen Ortiz and told her to prepare herself to go down to the Institute Anatomico Forense.

Dr Rodriguez was running late and Falcon sat down with El Pais. He skimmed past a photo of six drowned Moroccans on the beach at Tarifa, victims of another failed attempt to get into Europe. His eye settled on an article about the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague, or rather a sidebar which was giving an update on a strange continuing phenomenon. Since the beginning of July, when the Rome Statute of the permanent International Criminal Court had entered into force, the Americans, for reasons that were not clear, had been persuading governments who had signed the treaty to declare that they would not press or put up for trial any US citizen for prosecution by the ICC. They gave a list of the countries wavering under American pressure but no more information. The nurse called him in to Dr Rodriguez's consulting