meeting; why would you bother to go if you were planning to kill yourself? So something happened during this meeting to tip him over the edge, to make him believe, perhaps with his mind in an emotional turmoil, that he was in some way responsible.'
'I can't think who that person could be, or what they could possibly have said to him,' said Molero.
'What church did his friend the priest belong to?'
'It's close. That's why he took this apartment,' said Molero. 'San Marcos.'
'Did he still attend that church, even after the priest's death?'
'I don't know,' said Molero. 'We didn't see much of each other outside the office. I only know about San Marcos because I offered to go with him to his priest's funeral Mass.' To understand why Gamero had committed suicide they needed to talk to the person he'd met in the Archaeological Museum. Falcon asked Barros to find out from the rest of the antiterrorism squad if they'd seen Gamero with anybody they didn't recognize. He also wanted all names and telephone numbers from Gamero's office line, and in the meantime they'd check his mobile and the fixed line in his apartment. Barros gave him the mobile numbers of the other two officers in the antiterrorism squad and left with Paco Molero. The instructing judge signed off the levantamiento del cadaver and Gamero's body was removed. Falcon and the two forensics, Felipe and Jorge, began a detailed search of the apartment.
'We know he committed suicide,' said Felipe. 'All the doors were locked from the inside and the prints on the water glass next to the paracetamol trays match the body's. So what are we looking for?'
'Anything that might give us a lead to the person he met in his lunch break,' said Falcon. 'A business card, a scribbled number or an address, a note of a meeting…'
Falcon sat at the table in the kitchen with Gamero's wallet and the museum ticket. The tendons of his hands rippled under the cloudy membrane of the latex gloves. He felt sure that there were connections to be made out there, which he was just missing. Every lead they were pursuing failed to unfold into the greater narrative of what was going on. There were movements, like seismic aftershocks, that brought about casualties such as Ricardo Gamero, a man dedicated to his work and admired by his colleagues, who'd seen…what? His responsibility, or was it just the recognition of his failure?
He teased out the contents of Gamero's wallet: money, credit cards, ID, receipts, restaurant cards, ATM extracts-the usual. Falcon called Serrano and asked him to get the name and number of the priest of the San Marcos church. He went back to the wallet, turning over the cards and receipts, thinking that Gamero was a man who was used to a high level of secrecy in his life. Vital phone numbers would not be written down or stored in his mobile but either memorized or encoded in some way. He wouldn't have, or couldn't have, made contact with the person he saw in the museum on the day of the bomb. His department was being watched and they were all being kept in the office. He could have called at night after they were released from work. He would probably have used a public phone. The only chance was that he might not have remembered an infrequently used mobile number. He turned over the last ATM extract in the wallet. Nothing. He thumped the table.
'Have you got anything out there?' asked Falcon.
'Nothing,' said Jorge. 'The guy's in the CGI, he's not going to leave anything hanging around unless he wants us to find it.'
A call came through from Cristina Ferrera. She gave him the name and number of another Spanish convert, who would normally have been in the mosque at that time in the morning but had gone to Granada on the Monday evening. He was now back in Seville. His name was Jose Duran.
A few minutes later Serrano called with the name and number of the priest of the San Marcos church. Falcon told him to stop what he was doing and come to Calle Butron, pick up Gamero's ID and take it to the Archaeological Museum, where he should ask the ticket sellers and security guards if they remembered seeing Gamero and anybody he might have met.
The priest couldn't see him until after evening Mass at about 9 p.m. It was already 6.30. Falcon couldn't believe the time; the day almost gone and no significant breakthrough. He called Jose Duran, who was in the city centre. They agreed to meet in the Cafe Alicantina Vilar, a big, crowded pasteleria in the centre.
Serrano still hadn't showed up. Falcon left the ID with Felipe and decided it was quicker to walk to the pasteleria than get stuck in evening traffic. As he walked he put a call through to Ramirez and gave him a quick report on Ricardo Gamero, and told him he'd stolen Serrano for a few hours.
'We're not getting anywhere with these fucking electricians,' said Ramirez. 'All this manpower to find something that doesn't exist.'
'They do exist, Jose Luis,' said Falcon. 'They just don't exist in the form we expect them to.'
'The whole world knows we're looking for them and they haven't come forward. To me that means they're sinister.'
'Not everybody is a perfect citizen. They might be frightened. They probably don't want to get involved. They couldn't care less. They might be implicated,' said Falcon. 'So we have to find them, because they are the link from the mosque to the outside world. We have to find out how they fit into this scenario. There were three of them, for God's sake. Somebody, somewhere, knows something.'
'We need a breakthrough,' said Ramirez. 'Everybody's making breakthroughs except us.'
'You found the biggest breakthrough of all, Jose Luis-the Peugeot Partner and its contents. We have to keep up the pressure and then things will start to give way,' said Falcon. 'And what are all these other breakthroughs?'
'Elvira's called a meeting for 8 a.m. tomorrow. He can't talk until then, but it's international. The web's spreading wider by the hour.'
'That's the way these things go now,' said Falcon. 'Remember London? They were rounding up suspects in Pakistan inside a week. But I tell you, Jose Luis, there's something homegrown about this, too. The intelligence services are equipped to deal with all that worldwide web of international terrorism. What we do is find out what happened on our patch. Have you read the file on the unidentified body found at the dump on Monday morning?'
'Fuck, no.'
'Perez wrote a report on it and there's an autopsy in there, too. Read it tonight. We'll talk about it tomorrow.'
The waiter brought him a coffee and some sort of sticky pastry envelope with pus-coloured goo inside. He needed sugar. He had to wait half an hour for Jose Duran, in which time he took calls from Pablo of the CNI, Mark Flowers from the US Consulate, Manuela, Comisario Elvira and Cristina Ferrera. He turned his mobile off. Too many of them wanted to see him tonight and he had no more time to give.
Jose Duran was pale and emaciated, with hair plastered close to his head, round glasses and a fluffy beard. Deodorant was a stranger to his body and it was still 40°C outside. Falcon ordered him a camomile tea. Duran listened to Falcon's introduction and twizzled his beard into a point on his chin. He breathed on his glasses and wiped them clean with his shirt tail. He sipped his tea and gave Falcon his own introduction. He'd been to the mosque every day of last week. He'd seen Hammad and Saoudi talking to the Imam in his office on Tuesday, 30th May. He hadn't heard their conversation. He'd seen the council inspectors on Friday, 2nd June.
'They must have been from Health and Safety, because they looked at everything: water, drains, electricity. They even looked at the quality of the doors…something to do with fire,' said Duran. 'They told the Imam he was going to have to get a new fuse box, but he didn't have to do anything until they issued their report and then he had fifteen days to put it right.'
'And the fuse box blew on Saturday night?' said Falcon.
'That's what the Imam told us on Sunday morning.'
'Do you know when he called the electricians?'
'On the Sunday morning after prayers.'
'How do you know that?'
'I was in his office.'
'How did he find their number?'
'Miguel Botin gave it to him.'
'Miguel Botin gave the Imam the number of the electricians?'
'No. He reminded the Imam of the card he'd given him earlier. The Imam started to search the papers on his desk, and Miguel gave him another card and told him that there was a mobile number he could call any time.'
'And that was when the Imam called the electricians?'
'Isn't this sort of detail just a bit ludicrous in the light of…?'
