histories are not so easily matched to people.'
'You still haven't told me anything about Abdelkrim Benaboura.'
'Why do the CNI think it's so important for you to recruit Yacoub now, right at the moment when you're supposed to be heading the biggest murder enquiry of your career?'
'The CNI think they might have discovered something even bigger.'
'Like what?'
'They weren't prepared to say.'
'What have they got that's made them think that?'
'You don't miss much, Mark, do you?' said Falcon, but Flowers didn't answer. He was deep in distracted thought until he looked at his watch, knocked back his whisky and said he had to go. Falcon walked him to the door.
'Have you tried to recruit Yacoub Diouri yourself?' asked Falcon.
'Something worth remembering,' said Flowers, 'he doesn't like Americans. Now, who was that beautiful woman who left just as I arrived?'
'My ex-wife.'
'I've got two ex-wives,' said Flowers. 'It's funny how ex-wives are always more beautiful than wives. Think about that, Javier.'
'That's all you do, Mark, leave me with more to think about than when you arrived.'
'I'll give you something else to roll around your brain,' said Flowers. 'The CNI planted the story about the MILA in the press. How about that?'
'Why would they do that?'
'Welcome to my wonderful world, Javier,' said Flowers, walking off into the night.
He stopped at the end of the short avenue of orange trees and turned back to Javier, who was silhouetted in the doorway.
'One last piece of advice,' said Flowers. 'Don't try to understand the whole picture…there's nobody in the world who does.'
19
Seville-Wednesday, 7th June 2006, 04.05 hrs
Manuela lay in bed alone, trying to ignore the faint click of Angel's fingers on the keys of his laptop in another room. She blinked in the dark, holding back the full contemplation of something very horrible: the sale of her villa in El Puerto de Santa Maria, an hour's drive south from Seville on the coast. The villa had been left to her by her father, and every room was packed with adolescent nostalgia. The fact that Francisco Falcon didn't much like the place and loathed all the neighbours, the so-called Seville high society, had been erased from Manuela's memory. She imagined her father's spirit writhing in agony at the proposed sale. It was, however, the only way that she could see of repairing her financial situation. The banks had already called her before close of business, asking where the funds were that she'd told them to expect. It was the only solution that had come to her, in the death and debt hour of four o'clock in the morning. The estate agent had told her the obvious: the Seville property market would be stalled until further notice. She had four possible buyers for her villa, who were constantly 261 reminding her of their readiness to purchase. But could she let it go?
Angel had been calling her all day, trying to restrain the excitement in his voice. His conversation was full of the ramifications of Rivero's retirement and the great new hope of Fuerza Andalucia, Jesus Alarcon, who he'd been steering around all day, after interviewing him for the profile in the ABC. Angel's media manipulation had been brilliant. He'd kept Jesus off camera when he visited the hospital and got him to talk privately to the victims and their families. His greatest coup had been to get him through to Fernando Alanis in the intensive care unit. Jesus and Fernando had talked. No cameras. No reporters. And they'd hit it off. It couldn't have been better. Later, when the Mayor and a camera crew got through to intensive care, Fernando had mentioned Jesus Alarcon, on camera, as the only politician who hadn't sought to make any media capital out of the victims' misery. It was pure luck, but a total masterstroke for Angel's campaign. The Mayor had just managed to squeeze back the nervous smile that wanted to creep across his face. Consuelo couldn't stop herself. Why should she? She couldn't sleep. What better way to remember carefree sleep than to watch the experts; the calm faces of the innocents, eyelids trembling, softly breathing, deep and dreamless in their beds. Ricardo was first, the fourteen-year-old, who'd reached the gawky age, where his face was stretching in odd directions, trying to find its adult mould. This wasn't such a peaceful age, with too many hormones shooting around the body and sexual yearning fighting with football in his mind. Matias was twelve and seemed to be growing up quicker than his elder brother; easier to walk in somebody else's footsteps than to tread out one's own, as Ricardo had done with no father to guide him.
Consuelo knew where this was heading, though. Ricardo and Matias took care of themselves. It was Dario, her youngest at eight years old, who drew her in. She loved his face, his blond hair, his amber-coloured eyes, his perfect little mouth. It was in his room that she sat down in the middle of the floor, half a metre from his bed, looking into his untroubled features and easing herself into the uneasy state she craved. It started in her mouth, with the lips that had kissed his baby head. She drank it down her throat and felt the twinge in her breasts. It settled in her stomach, high up around the diaphragm, an ache that transmitted its pain from her viscera to the tingling surface of her skin. She scoffed at Alicia Aguado's questioning. What was wrong with such a love as this? Fernando Alanis sat in the intensive care unit of the Hospital de la Macarena. He watched his daughter's vital signs on the monitors. Grey numbers and green lines that told him good things, that she was capable of lighting up a machine, if not her father. His mind crashed and fell about like a hopeless drunk in a binfilled narrow alleyway. One moment it was gasping at the catastrophic destruction of the apartment building, the next it was buckling at the sight of four covered bodies outside the pre-school. He still couldn't quite believe what he had lost. Was this a mechanism of the mind that suspended things too unbearable to comprehend, almost to the point of a barely remembered nig htmare? He'd been told by people who'd survived bad falls from scaffolding that the rush of the ground coming to meet you was not so terrifying. The horror was in the eventual awakening. And with that he would lurch sickeningly forward to the bruised and battered face of his daughter, her oval mouth slack against the clear plastic concertina of tube. Everything inside him felt too big. His organs were jostled by the colossal inflation of hate and despair which had no direction, other than to make themselves as uncomfortable as possible. He went back to a time when his family and the building had been intact, but the thought of the third child he'd been proposing made him break down inside. He couldn't bear to take himself back to a state that would never exist again, he couldn't bear the notion of never seeing Gloria and Pedro again, he couldn't stomach the finality of that word 'never'.
He concentrated on his daughter's beating heart. The jumping line. Be-dum, be-dum, be-dum. The thready skip of the green fuse against the terminal blackness of the monitor made him rear back in his seat. It was all too fragile. Anything could happen in this life and did…and had. Perhaps the answer was to retreat into emptiness. Feel nothing. But that held its terror, too. The monstrous negativity of the black hole in space, sucking in all light. He breathed in. The air expanded his chest. He breathed out. His stomach wall relaxed. This, for the time being, was the only way to proceed. Ines lay where she had fallen. She hadn't moved since he'd left. Her body was a miasma of pain from the pummelling it had sustained from his hard, white knuckles. Nausea humped in her stomach. He'd punched her through her flailing hands; one of her fingers had been bent back. In an escalation of his fury he'd torn off his belt and lashed her, with the buckle digging into her buttocks and thighs. With each stroke he'd told her through clenched teeth: 'Never…speak…to my girlfriend…like that…ever again. Do you hear me? Never…again.' She'd rolled to the corner of the room to get away from him. He'd stood over her, breathing heavily, not so different from when he was sexually aroused. Their eyes met. He pointed his finger at her as if he might shoot her. She didn't pick up what he said. She'd taken in the purity of his hatred from his blank, basilisk eyes, the colourless lips and his red, swollen neck.
No sooner had he left the apartment than she started to rebuild her illusion. His anger was understandable. The whore had told him some nonsense and set him against her. That was the way these things worked. He was just fucking the whore, but she wanted more now. She wanted to be in the wife's shoes, on the wife's side of the bed, but she was just the whore so she had to play her little games. Ines hated the whore. A line came into her head from an old conversation with Javier: 'Most people are killed by people they know, because it is only they who are
