the buckle cut into her buttocks and thighs?'
He'd come into this interview with a sense of resistance as dense and powerful as a reinforced concrete dam, and within half an hour of questioning all that was left were some cracked and frayed bean canes. And then they caved in. He saw himself in front of a state prosecutor, facing these same questions, and he realized the hopelessness of his situation.
'Yes,' he said, on automatic, unable to find even the schoolboy creativity to invent the ridiculous lie to obscure his brutality. There was nothing ambiguous about the welt of a belt and the gouge of its buckle.
'Why don't you talk me through what happened on the last night of your wife's life,' said Zorrita. 'Earlier we'd reached the moment when you'd just made love to Marisa on the balcony.'
Calderon's eyes found a point midway between himself and Zorrita, which he examined with the unnerving intensity of a man spiralling down to the darker regions of himself. He'd never had these things said to him before. He'd never had these things revealed to him under such emotional circumstances. He was stunned by his brutality and he couldn't understand where, in all his urbanity, it came from. He even tried to imagine himself dealing out these beatings to Ines, but they wouldn't come to him. He did not see himself like that. He did not see Esteban Calderon's fists raining down on his fine-boned wife. It had been him, there was no doubt about that. He saw himself before and after the act. He remembered the anger building up to the beatings and it subsiding afterwards. It struck him that he had been in the grip of a blind savagery, a violence so intense that it had no place in his civilized frame. A terrifying doubt began to crowd his chest and affect the motor reflex of his breathing, so that he had to concentrate: in, out, in, out. And it was there, in the lowest and darkest circle of his spiralling thoughts, the completely lightless zone of his soul, that he realized that he could have murdered her. Javier Falcon had told him once that there was no greater denial than that of a man who had murdered his wife. The thought terrified him into a state of profound concentration. He'd never looked with such microscopic detail into his mind before. He began to talk, but as if he was describing a film, scene by horrible scene.
'He was exhausted. He had been completely drained by the experiences of the day. He stumbled into the bedroom, collapsed on to the bed and passed out immediately. He was aware only of pain. He lashed out wildly with his foot. He woke up with no idea where he was. She told him he had to get up. It was past three o'clock. He had to go home. He couldn't wear the same clothes as he had yesterday and appear on television. She called a taxi. She took him down in the lift. He wanted to sleep on her shoulder in the street. The cab arrived and she spoke to the driver. He fell into the back seat and his head rolled back. He was only vaguely aware of movement and of light flashing behind his eyelids. The door opened. Hands pulled at him. He gave the driver his house keys. The driver opened the door to the building. He slapped on the light. They walked up the stairs together. The driver opened the apartment door. Two turns of the lock. The driver went back down the stairs. The hall light went out. He went into the apartment and saw light coming from the kitchen. He was annoyed. He didn't want to see her. He didn't want to have to explain…again. He moved towards the light…'
Calderon paused, because he was suddenly unsure of what he was going to see.
'His foot crossed the edge of the shadow and stepped into the light. He turned into the frame.'
Calderon was blinking at the tears in his eyes. He was so relieved to see her standing there at the sink in her nightdress. She turned when she heard his footfall. He was going to skirt the table and pull her to him and squeeze his love into her, but he couldn't move because when she turned she didn't open her arms to him, she didn't smile, her dark eyes did not glisten with joy…they opened wide with abject terror.
'And what happened?' asked Zorrita.
'What?' asked Calderon, as if coming to.
'You turned into the kitchen doorway and what did you do?' asked Zorrita.
'I don't know,' said Calderon, surprised to find his cheeks wet. He wiped them with the flat of his palms and brushed them down his trousers.
'It's not unusual for people to have blank moments about terrible things that they have done,' said Zorrita. 'Tell me what you saw when you turned into the doorway of the kitchen.'
'She was standing at the kitchen sink,' he said. 'I was so happy to see her.'
'Happy?' said Zorrita. 'I thought you were annoyed.'
'No,' he said, holding his head in his hands. 'No, it was…I was lying on the floor.'
'You were lying on the floor?'
'Yes. I woke up on the floor in the corridor and I went back to the kitchen light and it was then that I saw Ines lying on the floor,' he said. 'There was a terrible quantity of blood and it was very, very red.'
'But how did she end up lying on the floor?' asked Zorrita. 'One moment she was standing and the next she's lying on the floor in a pool of blood. What did you do to her?'
'I don't know that she was standing,' said Calderon, searching his mind for that image to see if it really existed.
'Let me tell you a few facts about your wife's murder, Sr Calderon. As you said, the cab driver opened the door of the apartment for you, with two turns of the key in the lock. That means the door had been double locked from the inside. Your wife was the only person in the apartment.'
'Ye-e-e-s,' said Calderon, concentrating on Zorrita's every syllable, hoping they would give him the vital clue that would unlock his memory.
'When the Medico Forense took your wife's body temperature down by the river it was 36.1°C. She was still warm. The ambient temperature last night was 29°C. That means your wife had just been killed. The autopsy revealed that your wife's skull had been smashed at the back, that there had been a devastating cerebral haemorrhage and two neck vertebrae had been shattered. Examination of the crime scene has revealed blood and hair on the black granite work surface and a further large quantity of blood on the floor next to your wife's head which also contained bone fragments and cerebral matter. The DNA samples taken from your apartment belong only to you and to your wife. The shirt that was taken from you down by the river was covered in your wife's blood. Your wife's body showed indications of your DNA on her face, neck and lower limbs. The scene in the kitchen of your apartment was consistent with someone who had picked Ines up by the shoulders or neck and thrown her down on the granite work surface. Is that what you did, Sr Calderon?'
'I only wanted to embrace her,' said Calderon, whose face had broken up into the ugliness of his inner turmoil. 'I just wanted to hold her close.'
32
Seville-Thursday, 8th June 2006, 18.30 hrs
The Taberna Coloniales was at the end of the Plaza Cristo de Burgos. There was something colonial about its green windows, long wooden bar and stone floor. It was well known for the excellence of its tapas and it was popular for its traditional interior and the seating outside on the pavement of the plaza. This was Angel and Manuela's local. Falcon didn't want Angel's journalistic nose anywhere near the police work around the destroyed apartment block, nor did he want to have to discuss anything sensitive in the glass cylinder of the ABC offices on the Isla de la Cartuja. Most important of all, he needed to be close to Angel's home so that there would be the least trouble possible for him to give Falcon what he wanted. This was why he was sitting outside the Taberna Coloniales under a calico umbrella, sipping a beer and biting into the chilled flesh of a fat green olive, waiting for Angel to appear.
He took a call from Pablo.
'The Americans have sent over the handwriting samples you asked for-the Arabic and English script belonging to Jack Hansen.'
'He looks more like a Tateb Hassani to me than a Jack Hansen,' said Falcon.
'What do you want us to do with the samples?'
'Ask your handwriting experts to make a comparison between Tateb Hassani's Arabic script and the notes attached to the drawings found in the fireproof box in the mosque. And compare the English script to the handwritten notes in the copies of the Koran found in the Peugeot Partner and Miguel Botin's apartment.'
'You think he was one of them?' asked Pablo. 'I don't get it.'
'Let's make the comparison first and the deductions afterwards,' said Falcon. 'And, by the way, the Imam's
