'I need another coffee,' said Alarcon.
'Here's an interesting link for you to think about,' said Falcon. 'Informaticalidad to Horizonte, to Banco Omni, to…I4IT?'
The coffee machine gurgled, trickled, hissed and steamed, while Alarcon hovered around it, blinking in this new point of view, matching it to his own bank of knowledge. Doubt threaded its way across his eyebrows. Falcon knew this wasn't going to be enough, but he didn't have anything more. If Rivero, Zarrias and Cardenas didn't break down then Alarcon might be his only door into the conspiracy, but it was going to be a heavy door to open. He didn't know enough about Lucrecio Arenas to induce a sense of outrage in Alarcon at the way in which he'd been shamelessly exploited by his so-called 'father'.
'I know what you want from me,' said Alarcon, 'but I can't do it. I realize it's not fashionable to be loyal, especially in politics and business, but I can't help myself. Even suspecting these people would be like turning on my own family. I mean, they are my family. My father-in-law is one of these people…'
'That was why you were chosen,' said Falcon. 'You are an extraordinary combination. I don't agree with your politics, but I can see that, for a start, you are very courageous and that your intentions towards Fernando were completely honourable. You're an intelligent and gifted man, but your vulnerability is in your professed loyalty. Powerful people like that in a person, because you have all the qualities that they don't, and you can be manipulated towards achieving their goals.'
'It's a marvellous world in which loyalty is perceived as a vulnerability,' said Alarcon. 'You must be a man made cynical by your work, Inspector Jefe.'
'I'm not cynical, Sr Alarcon, I've just come to realize that it's the nature of virtue to be predictable,' he said. 'It's always evil that leaves one gasping at its bold and inconceivable virtuosity.'
'I'll remember that.'
'Don't make me any more coffee,' said Falcon. 'I have to sleep. Perhaps we should talk again when you've had time to think about what I've told you and I've started working on Rivero, Zarrias and Cardenas.' Alarcon walked him to the front door.
'As far as I am concerned, I have no wish to see Fernando punished for what he did to me,' he said. 'My sense of loyalty also enables me to understand the profound effects of disloyalty and betrayal. You might have charges you wish to press against him, but I don't.'
'If this gets out to the press I'll have no option but to prosecute him,' said Falcon. 'He stole a police firearm and there's a good case for attempted murder.'
'I won't talk to the press. You have my word on it.'
'You've just saved the career of one of my best junior officers,' said Falcon, stepping off the porch.
He walked to the gate and turned back to Alarcon.
'I presume, after last night's meeting, that Lucrecio Arenas and Cesar Benito are still in Seville,' he said. 'I would suggest a face-to-face meeting with one, or both, of them while the information I've just given you is still out of the public domain.'
'Cesar won't be there. He'll be at the Holiday Inn in Madrid for a conference,' said Alarcon. 'Is seventytwo hours from inception to demise of a political future some kind of Spanish record?'
'The advantage you have at the moment is that you, personally, are clean. If you can retain that, you will always have a future. It's only once you join hands with corruption that you're finished,' said Falcon. 'Your old friend Eduardo Rivero could tell you that from the bottom of the well of his experience.' Cristina Ferrera and Fernando were sitting in the back of Falcon's car. She'd cuffed his hands behind his back and he leaned forward with his head resting against the back of the front seat. Falcon thought that they'd been talking but were now exhausted. He turned to face them from the driver's seat.
'Sr Alarcon is not going to press charges and he won't talk to the newspapers about this incident,' he said. 'If I were to prosecute you I would lose one of my best officers, your daughter would lose her father and only parent and would have to be taken into care, or go to live with her grandparents. You would go to jail for at least ten years and Lourdes would never know you. Do you think that's a satisfactory outcome for a burst of uncontrollable rage, Fernando?'
Cristina Ferrera looked out of the window blinking with relief. Fernando raised his head from the back of the passenger seat.
'And had your rage got the better of you, had your hatred been so dire that no reason could have appealed to it, and you'd actually killed Jesus Alarcon, then all the above would still be true, although your prison sentence would be longer, and you'd have had the death of an innocent man on your conscience,' said Falcon. 'How does that feel, in the dawn light of a new day?'
Fernando looked straight ahead, through the windscreen, down the street growing lighter by the moment.
He said nothing. There was nothing to say.
38
Seville-Friday, 9th June 2006, 08.17 hrs
'You didn't make it to our appointment last night,' said Alicia Aguado.
'I was in no condition,' said Consuelo. 'I left you, went to the pharmacy with the prescription you'd given me, bought the drugs and didn't take them. I went back to my sister's house. I spent most of the day in her spare room. Some of the time I was crying so hard I couldn't breathe.'
'When was the last time you cried?'
'I don't think I ever have…not properly. Not with grief,' said Consuelo. 'I don't even remember crying as a child, apart from when I hurt myself. My mother said I was a silent baby. I don't think I was the crying type.'
'And how do you feel now?'
'Can't you tell?' said Consuelo, twitching her wrist under Aguado's fingers.
'Tell me.'
'It's not an easy state to describe,' said Consuelo. 'I don't want to sound like some mushy fool.'
'Mushy fool is a good start.'
'I feel better now than I have done for a long time,' said Consuelo. 'I can't say that I feel good, but that terrifying sense of impending hideousness has gone. And the strange sexual urges have gone.'
'So, you don't think you're going mad any more?' said Aguado.
'I'm not sure about that,' said Consuelo. 'I've lost all sense of equilibrium. I can't seem to have just one feeling, I'm both extremes at once. I feel empty and full, courageous and afraid, angry and placid, happy and yet grief- stricken. I can't find any middle ground.'
'You can't expect your mind to recover in twentyfour hours of crying,' said Aguado. 'Do you think you could describe what happened yesterday morning? You came to some sort of realization which completely felled you. I'd like you to talk about that.'
'I'm not sure I can remember how it came about,' said Consuelo. 'It's like the bomb going off in Seville. So much has happened that it already feels like ten years ago.'
'I'll tell you how it came about afterwards,' said Aguado. 'Concentrate on what happened. Describe it as best you can.'
'It started off like a pressure, as if there was a membrane stretched across my mind, like an opaque latex sheet, against which someone, or something, was pressing. It's happened to me before. It makes me feel queasy, as if I'm at that crossover point between being merry and drunk. When it's happened in the past I'd make it go away by doing something like rummaging in my handbag. The physical action would help to reassert reality, but I'd be left with the sensation of the imminence of something that had not come to pass. The interesting thing was that I stopped getting these moments a few years ago.'
'Were they replaced by something else?'
'I didn't think so at the time. I was just glad to be rid of the sensation. But now I'm thinking that it was then that the sexual urges started,' said Consuelo. 'In the same way that the pressure started during a lull of brain activity, so the urges would come, sometimes in a meeting, or playing with the kids, or trying on a pair of shoes. It was disturbing to have no control over when they appeared, because they would be accompanied by graphic images
