which left me feeling disgusted with myself.'
'So what happened yesterday?' asked Aguado.
'The membrane came back,' said Consuelo, palms suddenly moist on the arms of the chair. 'There was the pressure, but it was much greater and it seemed to be expanding at an incredible rate, so that I thought my head would burst. In fact, there was a sensation of bursting, or rather splitting, which was accompanied by that feeling you get in dreams of endlessly falling. I thought this is it. I'm finished. The monster's come up from the deep and I'm going to go mad.'
'But that didn't happen, did it?'
'No. There was no monster.'
'Was there anything?'
'There was just me. A lonely young woman in a rain-filled street, full of grief, guilt and despair. I didn't know what to do with myself.'
'When this happened, we were talking about someone you knew,' said Aguado. 'The Madrid art dealer.'
'Ah, yes, him. Did I tell you that he'd killed a man?'
'Yes, but you told me about it in a certain way.'
'I remember now,' said Consuelo. 'I told you about it as if his crime was greater than my own.'
'What does that mean?'
'That I believed that I had committed a crime?' said Consuelo, questioning. 'Except that I knew what I'd done. I had always faced up to the fact that I'd had the abortions, even the appalling way I'd raised the money for the first one.'
'Which had resulted in some confusion in your mind,' said Aguado. 'The graphic sexual images?'
'I don't understand.'
'This pain you mentioned when you watched your children sleeping, especially the youngest child-what do you think that was?'
Consuelo gulped, as the saliva thickened in her mouth and tears flooded her eyes and rolled down her face.
'You told me before that it was the love that was hurting,' said Aguado. 'Do you still think it was love?'
'No,' said Consuelo, after some long minutes. 'It was guilt at what I had done, and grief at what could have been.'
'Go back to that time when you were standing in the rain-filled street. I think you told me earlier that you were looking at some smart people coming out of an art gallery. Do you remember what you were thinking, before you decided that you wanted to be like them, that you wanted to 'reinvent' yourself?'
There was a long silence. Aguado didn't move. She stared straight ahead with her unseeing eyes and felt the pulse beneath her fingers, like string untangling itself.
'Regret,' said Consuelo. 'I wished I hadn't done it, and when I saw those people coming out into the street I thought that they were not the sort of people to get themselves into this state. It was then that I decided I wanted to leave this pathetic, lonely, pitiful person on this wet street and go and be someone else.'
'So, although you've always 'faced up' to what you'd done, there was also something missing. What was that?'
'The person who'd done it,' said Consuelo. 'Me.' The search warrants for Eduardo Rivero's house, the premises of Fuerza Andalucia, Angel Zarrias's apartment and Agustin Cardenas's residence were issued at 7.30 a.m. By 8.15 the forensics had moved in, the computer hard disks had been copied and evidence was being gathered and gradually shipped back to the Jefatura. Comisario Elvira, all six members of the homicide squad and three members of the CGI antiterrorism squad convened for a strategy meeting in the Jefatura at 8.45. The idea was that the nine-man interrogation team would interview the three suspects, with a few breaks, for a total of thirteen and a half hours. To prevent the suspects developing relationships or getting used to a certain style, every member of the team would interview each suspect for an hour and a half. While the first three interviewers worked the next wave would watch, and the third wave would rest or discuss developments. Lunch would be taken at 3 p.m. and there would be another tactical discussion. The next session would run from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. and, if none of the suspects had cracked, there would be a break for dinner and a final ninety-minute session at midnight.
The point of the interviews was not to persuade the suspects to admit to the killing of Tateb Hassani, but to force them to reveal who had put Fuerza Andalucia in touch with him, why he was being employed, where the documents he'd prepared had been delivered, and who else had been at the dinner at which Tateb Hassani had been poisoned.
Exhaustion was the communal state. The meeting broke up with sighs, hands run through hair, jackets removed and shirt sleeves rolled up. It was agreed that Falcon would take Angel Zarrias first, Ramirez would handle Eduardo Rivero, and Barros would start on Agustin Cardenas. Once they were told that the suspects were in the interview rooms they went downstairs.
Ferrera was due to follow Falcon interviewing Angel Zarrias. They stood in front of the glass viewing panel, looking at him. He was sitting at the table, wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, hands clasped, eyes fixed on the door. He seemed calm. Falcon began to feel too tired for this confrontation.
'You're going to find out that Angel Zarrias is a very charming man,' said Falcon. 'He especially likes women. I don't know him very well because he's the sort of man who keeps you at a distance with his charm. But there has to be a real person underneath that. There has to be the fanatic that wanted to make this conspiracy work. That's the man we want to get to, and once we've got to him we want to keep him there, exposed, for as long as possible.'
'And how are you going to do that?' said Ferrera. 'He's practically your brother-in-law.'
'I've learnt a few things from Jose Luis,' said Falcon, nodding at Rivero's interview room, which Ramirez had just entered.
'Then I'll keep an eye on both of you,' said Ferrera.
Angel Zarrias's eyes flicked up as Falcon opened the door to the interview room. He smiled and stood up.
'I'm glad it's you, Javier,' he said. 'I'm so glad it's you. Have you spoken to Manuela?'
'I spoke to Manuela,' said Falcon, who sat down without turning on any of the recording equipment or following any of the normal introductory procedure. 'She's very angry.'
'Well, people react in different ways to having their partners arrested in the middle of the night on suspicion of murder,' said Zarrias. 'I can imagine some people might get angry. I don't know how I'd feel myself.'
'She wasn't angry about your arrest,' said Falcon.
'She was pretty fierce with your officers,' said Angel.
'It was after I'd spoken to her that she became…incandescent with rage,' said Falcon. 'I think that would be a fair description.'
'When did you speak to her?' he asked, unnerved, puzzled.
'At about two o'clock this morning,' said Falcon. 'She'd already left about fifty messages on my mobile by then.'
'Of course…she would.'
'As you know, she can be quite a daunting prospect when she's emotionally charged,' said Falcon. 'It wasn't possible for me to just say that you'd been arrested on suspicion of murder and leave it at that. She had to know who, where and why.'
'And what did you tell her?'
'I had to tell her by degrees because, of course, there are legal implications, but I can assure you I only told her the truth.'
'What was this 'truth' that you told her?'
'That is what you are supposed to tell me, Angel. You are the perpetrator and I am the interrogator, and between us there is a truth. The idea is that we negotiate our way to the heart of it, but it's not up to me to tell you what I think you've done. That's your job.'
Silence. Zarrias looked at the dead recording equipment. Falcon was pleased to see him confused. He leaned over, turned on the recorder and made the introductions.
'Why did you kill Tateb Hassani?' asked Falcon, sitting back.
'And what if I tell you that I didn't kill him?'
'If you like, for the purposes of this interview, we won't draw a distinction between murder and conspiring to
