The Blind Man of Seville (16 page)

‘Or her entire landscape,’ said Ramírez. ‘For the worse.’

Ramírez picked up the video camera and drove them to Mudanzas Triana, who were on the Avenida Santa Cecilia. They spoke to the boss, Ignacio Bravo, who listened to their theoretical scenario with unmoving eyes behind puffy lids while smoking one Ducados lit from another.

‘First of all, it’s impossible,’ he said. ‘My workers are —’

‘They signed a statement,’ said Ramírez, dead bored, handing it over.

Bravo read the document, flicking ash in the vague direction of a miniature tyre that enclosed an ashtray.

‘They will be fired,’ he said.

‘Talk us through your arrangement with Sr and Sra Jiménez,’ said Falcón. ‘You can start with why they
wanted to move during Semana Santa, which must be the busiest time of year for a restaurant.’

‘And not cheap for removals. Our rates double. I explained it all to her, Inspector Jefe. But we couldn’t do it the next week when her restaurants were closed because. we’re all booked up … as is everybody else. So she paid her money. She didn’t care.’

‘When did you first take a look at the job?’

‘I went there last week to see the layout, the quantity of large furniture, the number of packing cases needed, all that stuff. I called her the next day to tell her it would be a two-day job and gave her a quote.’

‘A two-day job?’ said Ramírez. ‘So when did you start?’

‘Tuesday.’

‘Which would make it a three-day job.’

‘Sr Jiménez called to say he didn’t want his study moved until Thursday. I told him it would cost even more than double and that we could do the job in the time. He insisted. I don’t argue the point with rich people; I just make sure they pay. They’re the worst …’

He trailed off when he saw the look from the policemen.

‘How many people knew about the change from the original arrangement?’ asked Falcón.

‘I see what you’re getting at,’ he said, unable to get comfortable. ‘Of course, everybody had to know. It involved changing all the jobs around. You don’t think that one of my men is the murderer?’

‘What’s intriguing us,’ said Falcón, leaving Bravo’s suspicion to hang in the air, ‘is that, if our scenario is correct, the murderer must have known about the change in the arrangement. He must have known that Sr Jiménez was going to stay an extra night and be on his own. He could only know that from Sr Jiménez himself or from here. When did you confirm the job with Sra Jiménez?’

‘Wednesday, 4th April,’ he said, flicking through his diary.

‘When did Sr Jiménez make the change?’

‘Friday, 6th April.’

‘Had you already assigned a work team for the job?’

‘I did that on the Wednesday.’

‘How do you do that?’

‘I call my secretary, who informs the depot foreman, who writes it up on a whiteboard downstairs.’

Falcón asked to speak to the secretary. Bravo called her in: a small, dark nervous woman in her fifties. They asked what she’d said to the foreman.

‘I told him that there’d been a change, that Sr Jiménez didn’t want the study to be touched until Thursday morning and that a small bed should be left in the kids’ room.’

‘What did the foreman say?’

‘The foreman made a coarse remark about what the bed would be used for.’

‘What does he do with that information?’

‘He puts it up on the whiteboard in red to show that it’s a change,’ she said. ‘And he posts the comments about the study and bed in a separate column.’

‘He also types it on to their worksheets,’ said Bravo, ‘so there’s two ways they can’t forget. They’re not very gifted people in the removals business.’

The three men went down into the depot and looked at the whiteboard, which contained all the information for all jobs in April and May but with the Jiménez job still open. The foreman came out. The secretary was right, he looked the sort who kickstarted the day with a couple of brandies.

‘So everybody in this depot would know of the change to the Jiménez job?’ said Falcón.

‘Without a doubt,’ said the foreman.

‘What’s the security like here?’ asked Ramírez.

‘We don’t store anything here, so it’s minimal,’ said Bravo. ‘One man, one dog.’

‘During the day?’

Bravo shook his head.

‘No cameras either?’

‘It’s not necessary.’

‘So you can just walk in off the street through the back there from Calle Maestro Arrieta?’

‘If you wanted to.’

‘Any overalls gone missing?’ asked Ramírez.

Nothing had gone missing, nothing had been reported. The overalls were all standard issue with M
UDANZAS
T
RIANA
stencilled on the back. It wasn’t a difficult thing to copy.

‘Anybody been in here who shouldn’t?’ asked Ramírez.

‘Just people looking for work.’

‘People?’

‘Two or three guys a week come in here and I tell them the same thing. We don’t recruit people off the street.’

‘What about the last two weeks?’

‘A few more than usual trying to get some money together for Easter and the Feria.’

‘Twenty?’

‘More like ten.’

‘What did they look like?’

‘Well, fortunately they were all short and fat, otherwise I’d have a job recalling them all for you.’

‘Look, funny guy,’ said Ramírez, getting his finger out, ‘somebody came in here, picked up some information about the job you were doing in the Edificio Presidente and used it to get himself into an apartment there and torture an old man to death. So try a little harder for us.’

‘You didn’t say he was tortured to death,’ said Bravo.

‘I still don’t remember,’ said the foreman.

‘Maybe they were immigrants,’ said Ramírez.

‘Some of them might have been.’

‘Moroccans, maybe, who work for no money.’

‘We don’t employ —’ started Bravo.

‘We heard you the first time,’ said Ramírez. ‘I didn’t believe you then. So, look, if you want a quiet life with no visits from Immigration, then start thinking, start remembering who’s been in here since last Friday and if you saw anyone taking a particular interest in that whiteboard.’

‘Because,’ said Falcón, nodding at the foreman, ‘you’re the only person we’ve met who’s probably seen this killer, talked to him.’

‘And you know … that’s something the killer might start thinking, too,’ said Ramírez.
‘Buenos días.’

11

Saturday, 14th April 2001

‘He was right — Sr Bravo,’ said Ramírez. ‘It’s too obvious a connection but the killer could be one of his workers.’

‘But only if the second scenario, where Eloisa Gómez lets the killer into the apartment, is the correct one,’ said Falcón. ‘If he got in using the lifting gear he’d have been missing from work in the afternoon. We’re going to have to interview every worker and put more pressure on the girl.’

‘You know what I don’t like about this guy?’ said Ramírez. ‘Our killer?’

Falcón didn’t answer, stared out of the window at the different bars and cafés flashing past on Calle San Jacinto as they headed back up to the river through Triana. He was suddenly depressed by the way his investigation was coming down to the sort of minutiae of everyday life encountered in removals companies.

‘He’s lucky,’ finished Ramírez. ‘He’s very lucky, Inspector Jefe.’

‘Let’s hope he’s relying on it,’ said Falcón, savage and morose. He was jittery from the coffee on an empty stomach and flat from lack of sleep and still no break in the case. His men on the street in Los Remedios hadn’t
come up with anybody, not one person, who even remembered seeing the removals truck and the lifting gear.

‘What does that mean, Inspector Jefe?’

‘People who rely on their luck always rely on it until well after it has run out. Like gamblers,’ said Falcón. ‘They’re ultimately stupid people.’

‘Now you’re implying something, Inspector Jefe.’

‘Am I? I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t think he’s finished, do you? This killer.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You think he wants to test his luck some more … to see how far he can go.’

Falcón didn’t like this about Ramírez. The good cop in him who never stopped, who constantly observed, picked over words, levered up sentences. And now he was doing it to him.

‘You talk about “he”,’ said Falcón, a diversionary tactic, ‘but we haven’t even got that far.’

Ramírez grinned as they crossed the Puente de Isabel II and headed north along the east bank of the river towards San Jerónimo and the cemetery.

‘You know we’re wasting our time here, don’t you, Inspector Jefe?’

‘No, I don’t. Where do you think we’re going to get our break? We haven’t got it in any of the obvious places — on the body, in the apartment, in the Edificio Presidente, outside it, in the removals company — none of these places.’

‘You know I called you yesterday?’ said Ramírez, changing tack.

‘I didn’t pick up any messages until this morning.’

‘It was just that I was thinking you were right, Inspector Jefe,’ said Ramírez.

Falcón looked across at him slowly, nothing furtive, as
if he was just taking in the view of the ‘92 Expo site, La Isla Mágica looking totally mundane across the sluggish, grey river. Ramírez never thought anybody was right, least of all his Inspector Jefe.

‘As you said, it’s too elaborate. The method,’ said Ramírez.

‘For the motive to have been something as ordinary as business, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

It took a fraction of a second for a number of subliminal observations to coalesce in Falcón’s mind. Ramírez had been more agreeable today than ever before. He hadn’t undermined him at Mudanzas Triana. He’d dealt with the foreman, who was much more his type. He’d called him four times on a public holiday. He’d revealed that he’d been to see Eloisa Gómez and admitted that his impatience had sealed off possibly valuable information. He’d said that he, Javier Falcón, had been right.

‘You know the procedure,’ said Falcón. ‘We’re not allowed to do nothing. We had very little to offer Juez Calderón apart from Consuelo Jiménez and Eloisa Gómez. The former is a complex and sophisticated individual with opportunity and means, the latter had the opportunity but won’t talk to us. Our job is to develop leads and, when they don’t present themselves through the evidence, we either have to gradually and humanely sweat them out of people or dig for them … sometimes in barren places like cemeteries and address books.’

‘But you doubt that those sources will have any bearing on the case?’

‘There’s doubt, of course, but I’ll do it because it might throw up something that could indirectly develop a lead.’

‘Such as?’

‘What you talked about the other night. What was the guy’s name — Cinco Bellotas?’

‘Joaquín Lopez.’

‘The boys that Sra Jiménez fired … they saw the two men talking. We don’t know what that was about. It could have an implication, it could be totally innocent. We have to look at it.’

‘But you’re still thinking that this is the work of a disturbed mind?’

‘Undisturbed minds can become disturbed if their whole way of life is threatened.’

‘But all the filming, getting into the apartment, hiding there for twelve hours …’

‘We still don’t know that he did that. I’m more inclined to think that “he” formed a relationship with the girl, that “he” got the necessary information from Mudanzas Triana and put the two together to get into the apartment.’

‘But what about the horror show that he put Jiménez through?’

‘None of this is beyond imagination,’ said Falcón, doubting himself as he said it. ‘It’s not unimaginable, is it?’

‘It is to me.’

This was true, thought Falcón, and Marta Jiménez flashed through his mind with her vomity chin and padded eyebrow. Ramírez was uncomplicated. He would always be an Inspector because his imagination only ever allowed him to aspire to being the post above. His horizons were limited.

‘What do you think he showed him, Inspector?’

Ramírez braked for a traffic light, gripped the wheel, fixed his eyes on the car in front, waiting for him to move. He tried to jog his mind into unvisited lateral grooves.

‘The stuff of horror,’ said Falcón, ‘is not necessarily the truly terrible.’

‘Go on,’ said Ramírez, thinking him a strange beast, but glad to be relieved from creative duty.

‘Look at us now at the height of our civilization … I mean, we can laugh at cannibalism, for God’s sake. There’s nothing that can frighten us … we’ve seen it all, except …’

The lights changed, Ramírez stalled the car, horns honked.

‘Except what?’

‘That which we’ve decided we don’t know.’

‘Isn’t that unimaginable?’

‘I mean the things that we know about ourselves. The very private, deeply hidden stuff that we show no one and that we firmly deny ever happened because we would not be able to live with the knowledge.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about,’ said Ramírez. ‘How can you know something without knowing it? It’s fucking ridiculous.’

‘When my father moved to Seville in the sixties he became friendly with the local priest who used to walk past his door on the way to the church at the end of Calle Bailén. My father didn’t go to church or believe in God, but they used the same café and, over years of argument, became friends. One time at three in the morning my father was working in his studio and he heard someone shouting in the street: ‘Eh!
Cabrón!
You were sent to me, weren’t you, Francisco
Cabrón?’
It was the priest, who was not tranquil any more but angry and nearly mad. His cassock was torn apart, his hair was wild and he was drinking brandy from the bottle. My father let him in and he stormed around the patio raging against himself and his useless life. That morning he’d been giving communion and it had suddenly come to him.’

‘He lost his faith,’ said Ramírez. ‘They’re always doing that. They get it back.’

‘It was worse than that. He told my father that he’d never had any faith. His whole church career had started
because of a lie. There’d been a girl who hadn’t returned his love. It seemed that he’d gone into the Church to spite her and all he’d ended up doing was spiting himself. For more than forty years the priest had known this … but without knowing it. He was a good priest, but it didn’t matter because there was one flaw in the edifice of his life, the tiny lie on which it was all based.’