twirled an index finger to show that he was on to it. A policewoman came from the wreckage site and informed Calderon that the first body in the collapsed building had been found-an old woman on the eighth floor. They agreed to reconvene in a couple of hours. Ramirez came off the phone as Cristina Ferrera arrived from the pre-school.
It was agreed that Ramirez would continue working on the vehicle identification with Sub-Inspector Perez, Serrano and Baena. Falcon and Cristina Ferrera would start trying to find the occupants of the five-storey apartment building with the best view of the car park where the Peugeot Partner had been left. They went down the street towards the police cordon where a group of people had gathered, waiting to be able to get back into their apartments.
'How was Fernando by the time you left him?' asked Falcon. 'I didn't catch his surname.'
'Fernando Alanis,' she said. 'He was more or less under control, considering what had happened to him. We've exchanged numbers.'
'Has he got anybody he can go to?'
'Not in Seville,' she said. 'His parents are up north and too old and sick. His sister lives in Argentina. His wife's family didn't approve of the marriage.'
'Friends?'
'His life was his family,' she said.
'Does he know what he's going to do?'
'I've told him he can come and stay with me.'
'You didn't have to do that, Cristina. He's not your responsibility.'
'You knew I'd offer though, didn't you, Inspector Jefe?' she said. 'If the situation demanded it.'
'I was going to put him up at my place,' said Falcon. 'You've got to go to work, the kids…you don't have any room.'
'He needs a sense of what he's lost,' she said. 'And who'd look after him at your place?'
'My housekeeper,' said Falcon. 'You won't believe me, but I really did not intend for that to happen.'
'We have to pull together or we let them win by falling apart,' she said. 'And you always choose me for this type of work-once a nun always a nun.'
'I don't remember saying that.'
'But you remember thinking it, and didn't you say that we weren't just foot soldiers in the fight against crime,' said Ferrera, 'but that we're here to help as well. We're the crusading detectives of Andalucia.'
'Jose Luis would laugh in your face if he heard you say that,' said Falcon. 'And you should be very wary of using words like that in this investigation.'
'Fernando was already accusing 'the Moroccans',' she said. 'Ever since March 11th they've been watching them go into that mosque and wondering.'
'That's the way people's minds naturally work these days, and they like to have their suspicions confirmed,' said Falcon. 'We can't take their prejudices into this investigation. We have to examine the facts and keep them divorced from any natural assumptions. If we don't, we'll make the sort of mistakes they made right from the beginning in the Madrid bombings when they blamed ETA. Already there are confusing aspects to the evidence that we've found in the Peugeot Partner.'
'Explosives, copies of the Koran and a green sash and black hood don't sound confusing to me,' said Ferrera.
'Why two copies of the Koran? One brand-new cheap Spanish edition and the other heavily used and annotated, but exactly the same edition.'
'The extra copy was a gift?'
'Why leave it in full view on the front seat? This is Seville, people usually leave their cars completely empty,' said Falcon. 'We need more information on these books. I want you to find out where they were bought and if there was a credit card or cheque used.'
He tore the page from his notebook with the ISBNs and bar codes, recopied them and gave Ferrera the torn page.
'What are we trying to find out from the occupants of this apartment block?'
'Keep it simple. Everybody's in shock. If we can find witnesses we'll bring them to this car park, ask whether they saw the Peugeot Partner arrive, if they saw anybody getting out of it, how many, what age and if they took anything out of the back.'
At the police cordon Falcon called out the address of the apartment block. An old man in his seventies came forward and a woman in her forties with a bruised face and a plastered arm in a sling. Falcon took the old man, Ferrera the woman. As they passed the entrance to their block a bomb squad man and a fireman confirmed that the building was now clear. Falcon showed the old man the Peugeot Partner and took him back up to his thirdfloor apartment, where the living room and kitchen were covered in glass, all the blinds in shreds, the chairs fallen over, photographs on the floor and the soft furniture lacerated, with brown foam already protruding from the holes.
The old man had been lying on his bed in the back of the apartment. His son and daughter-in-law had already left for work, with the kids, who were too old for the pre-school, so nobody had been hurt. He stood in the midst of his wrecked home with his left hand shaking and his old, rheumy eyes taking it all in.
'So you're here on your own all day,' said Falcon.
'My wife died last November,' he said.
'What do you do with yourself?'
'I do what old guys do: read the paper, take a coffee, look at the kids playing in the pre-school. I wander about, talk to people and choose the best time to smoke the three cigarettes I allow myself every day.'
Falcon went to the window and pulled the ruined blinds away.
'Do you remember seeing that van?'
'The world is full of small white vans these days,' said the old man. 'So I can't be sure whether I saw the same van twice, or different vans in two separate instances. On the way to the pharmacy I saw the van for the first time, driving from left to right down Calle Los Romeros, with two people in the front. It pulled into the kerb by the mosque and that was it.'
'What time?'
'About ten thirty yesterday morning.'
'And the next time?'
'About fifteen minutes later on the way back from the pharmacy I saw a white van pull into the parking area, but not in that spot. It was on the other side, facing away from us, and only one guy got out.'
'Did you see him clearly?'
'He was dark. I'd have said he was Moroccan. There are a lot of them around here. He had a round head, close-cropped hair, prominent ears.'
'Age?'
'About thirty. He looked fit. He had a tight black T-shirt on and he was muscled. I think he was wearing jeans and trainers. He locked the car and went off through the trees to Calle Blanca Paloma.'
'Did you see the van when it arrived in the position it is now?'
'No. All I can tell you is that it was there by six thirty in the evening. My daughter-in-law parked next to it. I also remember that when I went for coffee after lunch the van had left its position on the other side. There aren't so many cars during the day, except for the ones belonging to teachers lined up in front of the school, so I don't know how, but I noticed it. Old guys notice different things to other people.'
'And there were two men when it was going along Calle Los Romeros?'
'That's why I can't be sure if it was the same van.'
'On which side of the van did your daughter-in-law park her car?'
'To the left as we're looking at it,' said the old man. 'Her door was blown open by the wind and knocked into it.'
'Did the van move again at all?'
'No idea. Once people are around me I don't notice a thing.'
Falcon took the daughter-in-law's name and number and called her as he walked upstairs. He talked her through the conversation he'd just had with her father-in-law and asked her if she'd had a look at the van when her door had knocked into it.
'I checked it, just to make sure I hadn't dented it.'
