temperature had now reached 45°C. There was no one on the streets. Cars bulldozed the heat down the shimmering tarmac. When they arrived at the Jefatura he told Ferrera to leave the reports on Ramirez's desk and they would reconvene at 6 p.m.
The heat had broken Falcon's appetite. At home he managed a bowl of gazpacho, of which Encarnacion made a daily supply. He could not find the energy, with the heat crammed into every corner of the house, to look through the Jimenez photographs he'd brought in from the car. He went upstairs, stripped and showered and collapsed into the air-conditioned cool of his bedroom. His brain wavered and released images of the day. He lurched into sleep and a recurring dream where he entered a public toilet which was pristine until he flushed it, whereupon it started filling up with sickening quantities of shit until it overflowed. He found himself trapped and had to climb the walls of the cubicle, only to find all the other toilets were doing the same thing so that he felt a rush of nausea followed by a deep animal panic. He woke up, his hair full of sweat and his mind inexplicably latched on to Pablo Ortega until he remembered the actor's cesspit problem.
It was 5.30 p.m. The shower drilled the muck out of his hair and head. His mind tripped forwards and backwards under the pummelling water. He knew why he had dreamt the dream – another investigation, his own past and the past of others all rucked up by the tragedy. What he was unprepared for was his mind's next leap, which told him that he should go and visit Pablo Ortega's son, Sebastian, in prison. This would be nothing to do with his investigation, just a separate mission. The idea made him feel good. Something creaked open in his chest. He felt more able to breathe.
He took the Jimenez photographs into the study and pulled out the shots of Pablo Ortega. There was one of Pablo smiling and talking to two men. One of these men was obscured by people in the foreground and the other man he did not know. He took the photo with him, put it on the passenger seat.
Ramirez was typing up his report on his interviews in Vega's offices and the latest on the search for Sergei. Falcon told him about the passport in the name of Emilio Cruz and the key. Ramirez took down the details.
'I'll e-mail this to the Argentinean Embassy in Madrid, see what they make of it,' said Ramirez. 'And I'll put a trace right back to the original issuing office on Rafael Vega's ID.'
'Can we get something on that before the weekend?'
'Not in July, but we can try.'
'Any news on Sergei?'
'He was seen some time in the last couple of weeks in a bar on Calle Alvar Nunez Caleza de Vaca with a woman who was not Spanish and talked the same language as him. The woman had been seen there before and the barman thought she came from the Poligono San Pablo. He also thought she was a hooker. We've got a full description and Serrano and Baena are working with it now.'
Falcon listened to his messages, staring at the photograph he'd brought up from the car. Calderon had postponed their meeting until the following morning. He put a call through to Inspector Jefe Alberto Montes from GRUME (Grupo de Menores), who was responsible for crimes against children, and asked if he could pass by for an informal chat. Ferrera arrived as he was leaving and he told her to work on the phone numbers listed beside calls in and out of the Vegas' house and Rafael Vega's mobile, and then join Serrano and Baena looking for the woman seen with Sergei.
'What about the key we found with the passport in Vega's house?'
'Sergei is more important at this stage. We need a witness,' said Falcon. 'Work on the key if you have time. Start with the banks.'
On the way up to Montes's office he dropped in on Felipe and Jorge in the lab. He talked them through the autopsies. They looked dismal. They had nothing to offer from the crime scene. The pillow had been clean of any sweat or saliva. The only curious thing they'd come across was to do with the note in Vega's hand.
'As his lawyer said, it's clearly his own handwriting, but we thought it interesting that he should describe it as 'careful' so I looked at it under the microscope,' said Felipe. 'It's traced over.'
'What do you mean?'
'He'd written it before, which left an indent on the page beneath, then he'd gone back to the pad and traced over the indent… as if he wanted to see what had been written.'
'But
'I can only tell you the facts,' said Felipe.
Alberto Montes was in his early fifties, overweight, with bags under his eyes and a nose that had exploded from excessive drinking. He'd undergone a psychological assessment at the end of last year because of the drinking problem and had somehow got through it. He was looking at early retirement now and seemed anxious to get there. He had been with the Grupo de Libertad Sexual, which investigated adult sex crimes, and GRUME for over fifteen years and held an encyclopaedic knowledge of names and the horrors attached to them. He sat turned away from his desk, looking out of his second-floor window, smoking and presumably thinking of future freedom. He strained water from a plastic cup through his thick moustache as if he was wishing it was whisky. As Falcon reached his desk he swivelled in his chair and refilled the plastic cup.
'Kidney stones, Inspector Jefe,' he said. 'They get me every summer. I've been told to drink six litres of water a day. What can I do for you?'
'Eduardo Carvajal,' said Falcon. 'Remember him?'
'He's burnt on my heart, that guy. He was going to make me famous,' said Montes. 'Why has his name suddenly reappeared?'
'I'm investigating the deaths of Rafael and Lucia Vega.'
'Rafael Vega… the constructor?' said Montes.
'Do you know him?'
'I don't get invited to his caseta in the Feria, but I know who he is,' said Montes. 'Did somebody kill him?'
'That's what we're trying to find out. While I was going through his address book I came across Carvajal and it was a name that rang bells from that case I investigated last year – he was known to, and a friend of, Raul Jimenez. I didn't have time to dig him up then so I thought I'd try now,' said Falcon. 'How was he going to make you famous?'
'He said he was going to give me all the names of everybody who'd been a part of his paedophile ring… ever. He promised me the biggest coup of my career. Politicians, actors, lawyers, councillors, businessmen. He said he would bring me the golden key which would open up high society and reveal it for the rotten, stinking egg it really was. And I believed him. I genuinely thought he was going to come through with the information.'
'But he died in a car crash before he could deliver.'
'Well, he came off the road,' said Montes. 'It was late at night, there was alcohol in his system and it was a very tricky series of bends from Ronda to San Pedro de Alcantara… but we'll never know.'
'What does that mean?'
'All this is pretty well known, Inspector Jefe. By the time I'd been notified, he'd been buried and the car was a block in a breaker's yard about that big -' said Montes, holding his hands fifty centimetres apart.
'But some people were convicted, weren't they?'
Montes held up four fat fingers with a cigarette burning amongst them.
'And they couldn't help you in the same way that Carvajal could?'
'They only knew each other. They were one cell in the ring,' said Montes. 'They're careful, these people. It's no different to a terrorist outfit or a resistance movement.'
'How did you get to them in the first place?'
'I'm ashamed to have to tell you it was through the FBI,' said Montes. 'We can't even crack our own paedophile rings.'
'So it was international?'
'That's the internet for you,' said Montes. 'The FBI were running a sting operation. They found a couple in Idaho who were managing a child porn site and they took it over. They picked up addresses from all over the world and informed the local authorities in each country. It's good to know that there are a lot of scared paedophiles out there, but I don't think we'll pull in any of the people that Carvajal knew. I'm sure that's all finished.'
'Why?'
'Carvajal was the key man. He was procuring. They knew him. He knew them. But they didn't know each other. There's nothing to hold it together.'
