murder,' said Falcon. 'Does that make it easier for you?'
'What if I tell you I had nothing to do with the murder of Tateb Hassani?'
'You've already been implicated, along with Agustin Cardenas, by the host of Hassani's final and fatal dinner, Eduardo Rivero. You've also been identified as being present at the scene of the crime by an employee in his household,' said Falcon. 'So for you to say that you had nothing to do with Hassani's death would be a very difficult position to defend.'
Angel Zarrias looked deeply into Falcon's face. Falcon had been looked at like this before. His old technique, before his breakdown in 2001, was to meet it with the armour-plated stare. His new technique was to welcome them in, bring them to the lip of his deep well and dare them to look down. This was what he did to Angel Zarrias. But Angel wouldn't come. He looked hard but he never came to the edge. He backed off and glanced around the room.
'Let's not get bogged down in all the detail,' said Falcon. 'I'm not interested in who put the cyanide in what, or who was present when Agustin Cardenas did his gruesome work. Although I am interested to know whose idea it was to sew Tateb Hassani into a shroud. Did you come up with any suitable Islamic orisons for him? Did you wash him before you sewed him up? It was a bit tricky for us to tell once we'd discovered him, bloated and stinking, with the shroud torn off, on the rubbish dump outside Seville. But I thought that was a nice touch of respect from one religion to another. Was that your idea?'
Angel Zarrias had pushed his chair back and, in his agitation, had started to pace the room.
'You're not talking to me already, Angel, and we've only just started.'
'What the hell do you expect me to say?'
'All right. I know. It's difficult. You've always been a good Catholic, a man of great religious faith. You even managed to get Manuela to go to Mass, and she must have loved you to do that,' said Falcon. 'Guilt is a debilitating state for a good man, such as yourself. Living in mortal sin must be petrifying but, equally, it's a daunting task to bring yourself to the confessional for the greatest of human crimes. I'm going to make this easier for you. Let's forget about Tateb Hassani for the time being and move on to something you're more comfortable with, that you should be able to talk about, that should loosen your vocal cords so that you will, eventually, be able to come back to the more demanding revelations.'
Angel Zarrias stopped in his tracks and faced Falcon. His shoulders slumped, his chest looked like a cathedral roof on the brink of collapse.
'Go on then, ask your question.'
'Where were you on Wednesday, 7th June between 1.30 p.m. and 3 p.m.?'
'I can't recall. I was probably having lunch.'
'Sit down and think about it,' said Falcon. 'This is the day after the explosion. You would have received a phone call from someone who was desperate. I'm sure you'd remember that: a fellow human being in distress who needed to speak to you.'
'You know who it is, so you tell me,' said Angel, who'd started his agitated walking again.
'SIT DOWN, ANGEL!' roared Falcon.
Zarrias had never heard Falcon shout before. He was shocked at the anger simmering beneath the placid surface. He swerved towards the chair, sat down and stared into the table with his hands clasped tight.
'You were seen and identified by a security guard,' said Falcon.
'I went to the Archaeological Museum and met a man called Ricardo Gamero.'
'Are you aware of what happened to Ricardo Gamero about half an hour after you spoke to him?'
'He committed suicide.'
'You were the last person to speak to him, face to face. What did you talk about?'
'He told me he had developed feelings for another man. He was very ashamed and distressed about it.'
'You're lying to me, Angel. Why should a committed CGI agent leave his office during the most important antiterrorist investigation ever to happen in this city, to go and discuss his sexual angst with you?'
'You asked me a question and I replied,' said Zarrias, without taking his eyes off the table.
Falcon pummelled Zarrias with questions about Ricardo Gamero for three-quarters of an hour, but could not get him to budge from his story. He accused Zarrias of telling Marco Barreda from Informaticalidad to offer up the same lie. Zarrias didn't even give Falcon the satisfaction of a flicker of recognition at this new name. Falcon made a show of ordering Barreda to be brought down to the Jefatura for questioning. Zarrias hung on grimly, knowing that this was the difference between life and a living death.
It was well past 10 a.m. when Falcon returned to the murder of Tateb Hassani. Zarrias looked pale and sick from maintaining his wall of deceit. One eye was bloodshot and his lower lids were hanging down from his eyeballs to reveal raw, veined and shiny flesh.
'Let's talk about Tateb Hassani again,' said Falcon. 'An employee, Mario Gomez, saw you, Rivero and Hassani going upstairs to the Fuerza Andalucia offices in Rivero's house to dine on a buffet that he'd just laid out. The time was 9.45 p.m. Rivero has told us that Agustin Cardenas arrived a little later and parked his car underneath the arch of the entrance. Tell me what happened in the time between you going up the stairs and Tateb Hassani's body being brought down to be loaded into Agustin Cardenas's Mercedes E500.'
'We drank some chilled manzanilla, ate some olives. Agustin turned up a little after ten o'clock. We served ourselves from the buffet. Eduardo opened a special bottle of wine, one of his Vega Sicilias. We ate, we drank, we talked.'
'What time did Lucrecio Arenas and Cesar Benito arrive?'
'They didn't. They weren't there.'
'Mario Gomez told us that there was enough food for eight people.'
'Eduardo has always been generous with his portions.'
'At what point did you administer the cyanide to Tateb Hassani?'
'You're not going to get me to incriminate myself,' said Angel. 'We'll leave that for the court to decide.'
'How was Tateb Hassani introduced to you?'
'We met at the Chamber of Commerce.'
'What did Tateb Hassani do for you?'
'He helped us formulate our immigration policy.'
'Jesus Alarcon says that was already in place months ago.'
'Tateb Hassani was very knowledgeable about North Africa. He'd read a lot of the UN reports about the mass assaults by illegal immigrants on the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. We were incorporating new ideas into our policy. We had no idea how well-timed his help would be in view of what happened on 6th June.'
Falcon announced the end of the interview and flicked off the recorder. It was more important now that he prepare Zarrias for the next interview. There was plenty of evidence of decrepitude in his face, but he had retreated into himself, concentrated his powers into a nucleus of defence. Falcon had only achieved some superficial damage. Now he had to make him vulnerable.
'I had to tell Manuela,' said Falcon. 'You know what she's like. I told her that you'd had to murder Tateb Hassani because he was the only element outside the conspiracy and, therefore, the only danger to it. If he was left alive it would render Fuerza Andalucia vulnerable. Manuela wasn't prepared to deal in those sorts of generalizations so I had to give her the detail; how you'd employed him and where evidence of his handwriting was found. She knows you, of course, Angel. She knows you very well. She hadn't quite realized how far your obsession had gone. She hadn't realized that you'd gone from being extreme to fanatical. And she admired you so much, Angel, you know that, don't you? You helped her a lot with your positive energy. You helped me, too. You saved my relationship with her, which was important to me. I believe that she could have forgiven you this misguided attempt to finally grab a workable power, even if she didn't hold with your extreme beliefs. She thought, at least, that you were honourable. But there was something that she could not forgive.'
At last Zarrias looked up, as if he'd just come to the surface of himself. The tired, bruised and sagging eyes were suddenly alive with interest. In that moment Falcon realized something he'd never quite been sure about: Angel loved Manuela. Falcon knew that his sister was attractive, plenty of people had told him that they found her funny and that she had a great zest for life, and he'd seen her affect men touchingly by playing the little girl as well as the grown woman. But Falcon knew her too well and it had always seemed unlikely to him that anybody not related to Manuela could love her absolutely, because she had too many faults and dislikeable traits constantly on display. Clearly, though, she'd given something to Angel that he'd missed from his previous marriage, because there
