The Blind Man of Seville (28 page)

Silence. Long enough for a new ice age to have formed.

‘Why do you think …?’ started Falcón.

‘What
are you talking about, Inspector Jefe?’

The vicious edge to her voice shredded his confidence and the possibility loomed in his mind that they had been mistaken, that Ramírez had misjudged, that it hadn’t been her and the furniture in the office was rushing past him as he crashed headlong into the most embarrassing moment of his professional career.

‘I was wondering,’ he said, steadying himself, ‘why anybody would want to send us this film.’

‘Why do you think you can come into my office with this disgusting notion …?’

‘Do you have a video player?’

‘Come with me,’ she said, snatching up the bag.

They left the office and went down the corridor to a small room with a two-seater sofa, a chair and a TV/Video. Falcón struggled into a latex glove with his hands
now running with sweat. The film was preset to start at the fourth section. He decided to avoid maximum embarrassment by just playing the first moments where the four people are let into the apartment. He froze the frame on her as she came in the door. She scoffed at it, holding her blonde hair out to him. He let the video play on until the camera closed in on her unmistakable face. He tried to freeze the frame but the video would not obey. The young Consuelo unzipped the man’s trousers and fished out his penis and that was when Consuelo Jiménez, puce in the face, barged him out of the way, stopped the video, and tore it out of the player.

‘That
is evidence,’ said Falcón.

She smashed the cassette to the ground, impaled it with her heel. The plastic casing cracked and she tried to shake it off but it was as tenacious as dog shit. She kicked her shoe off, ripped the cassette off the heel and dashed it against the wall where it splintered and fell into pieces. Falcón rushed at it with the evidence bag and shovelled in the remains. She was on him, hitting him about the head and back, screaming and livid, the language worse than he’d heard even in the drug dens of the Polígono San Pablo. He turned on her, grabbed her by the shoulders, shouted into her face and she broke down on his shoulder and wept into the material of his suit.

He sat her down on the sofa. She buried her face in the arm. Falcón’s mind split into two worlds; was this pretence or real? She came round slowly, face destroyed. He sat in the chair to distance himself.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that
was
me.’

‘A hard time?’

‘A very bad moment,’ she said, reducing the hours it must have taken to a flashing fraction.

‘Money problems?’

‘Everything problems,’ she said, staring into the abyss
of the inevitability of intrusion. ‘I volunteered the details of my second abortion, paid for by my lover. This was the prelude to my first abortion, financed by me. Return flight to London, hotel and hospital. It was a lot of money to raise in two months without any help.’

She shuddered, put her hand to her mouth as if she might be sick.

‘It’s not the kind of thing anybody would want to have to remember,’ she said. ‘That a pregnant woman had to do that sort of thing to earn the money to terminate a foetus. It’s just completely disgusting to me.’

This was a big lesson, this Sight Lesson No.1. Perhaps it would have been good for Ramírez to have seen this, because this fits with the profile of the killer. He knows things. He finds the shame or the horror in people’s pasts and shows it to them, forces them to relive it.

‘How would anybody know about this?’ asked Falcón. ‘Did anybody know about it?’

‘I’d already edited it out of my own life. I can’t remember a thing about it. I did something that had to be done and when it was over I dispatched it to the deepest abyss. I can barely remember who I knew at that time. I came back from London and set about changing everything.’

‘The father?’

‘You mean the man who did
not
become a father,’ she said. ‘He was a mechanic at a garage my father managed. When I told him, he ran. I never saw him again.’

‘How would anybody know about this?’

‘They wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘It was the first time in my life I’d encountered true loneliness. I did everything on my own. I didn’t even tell my sister.’

‘How did you find the clinic in London?’ he asked, the sordid checking of the facts inevitable.

‘My doctor gave me an address in Madrid of a woman who had all the details.’

‘And raising the money … how did you find yourself in that world?’

‘They were people who knew about that address, too,’ she said. ‘It was no coincidence that I should meet a girl in a café on the same afternoon, who made a proposal to me that would supply precisely the right amount of money.’

‘Did you see her again?’

‘Never.’

‘And the other performers?’ he asked, and she shook her head.

‘You know, given the racket they were involved in, they were surprisingly good people. What we were doing was depraved and the atmosphere on the set should have been horrible, but we smoked a few joints and it was all very friendly. They were humane and sympathetic. I was probably lucky. I’ve met more abusive people in the restaurant business. And the sex … the sex was really nothing. The most difficult thing was for the men to maintain an erection because it was all so uncharged … unsexy.’

Falcón squirmed as the question he didn’t want to ask formed in his head. He shelved it. Too distasteful.

‘You said you changed everything when you came back to Spain.’

‘The night before the operation I was staying in a cheap hotel in Victoria. I went walking to take my mind off the next day. I wanted to lose myself. I went up to Hyde Park Corner, down Piccadilly into Shepherd’s Market and Berkeley Square. I drifted into Albemarle Street and found myself outside an art gallery. There was an opening of an exhibition. I watched the people as they came and left. They were beautifully dressed, sophisticated and completely urbane. None of those women would have got themselves pregnant by a garage mechanic. I decided
that they were my people and I would consort with them and become them.

‘When I got back to Madrid I worked hard and bought some nice clothes and went to see a gallery owner who said I was unsuitable, that I didn’t know the first thing about art. He humiliated me. He took me around the paintings and let me reveal my ignorance. Then he asked me about the frames. Frames? What did I care about frames? He told me to learn how to type and threw me out.’

She was mesmerizing Falcón, fixing him with a look of pure grit. Her fist was balled on the arm of the chair, just as it had been in the film.

‘I studied art history. Not formally — I couldn’t afford that. I worked at it in my spare time. I went to meet frame makers. I met artists, unknowns, but ones who knew what they were talking about. I worked in a shop selling art materials. I learnt everything. I met more established artists … and that was how I got the job in the gallery. And when I got it I went back to the guy who turned me down. He didn’t remember me. While we were talking Manolo Rivera came in … do you know him?’

‘Not personally.’

‘Well, he came in and kissed me and said
hola
and the gallery owner offered me a job on the spot. It gave me great pleasure to turn him down.’

‘Did your husband know any of this?’

‘Only you, Inspector Jefe,’ she said. ‘Intimacy is easier with those that don’t share your bed. And … I think we recognize each other, don’t we, Don Javier?’

Falcón blinked at her, not sure where she was leading him.

‘We look as if we’re on the inside,’ she said, ‘but we’re not. We’re on the outside looking in, just like your father.’

‘But not your husband,’ he said, to change the subject.

‘Raúl? Raúl was lost,’ she said. ‘If that was what he was watching when he was with his puta, what does that tell you about him?’

‘Ramírez said it was guilt.’

‘Ramírez isn’t as stupid as he looks,’ she said, ‘… just macho.’

‘You don’t think your husband knew it was you?’ said Falcón.

‘I can’t believe he did. I didn’t get a credit.’

‘He saw the likeness, though.’

She nodded.

‘Do you think that, for Raúl, to see someone who looked like his first wife …’

‘… behaving like a puta,’ she added for him.

‘… somehow assuaged his feelings of guilt?’

She shrugged, stood up, smoothed her skirt, said she had to go for lunch.

He walked back to the Edificio de los Juzgados, the day gone grey again, the leaves of the palm trees clacking in the breeze as the clouds reasserted themselves. Ramírez was waiting for him outside the Edificio de los Juzgados with a thick file under his arm. They went through security. He pulled a sheet of paper from the file: an inventory of Raúl Jiménez’s possessions in the Mudanzas Triana warehouse.

On the way up to Juez Calderón’s office he read through the inventory, which included a complete home movie kit, an 8mm camera, film canisters, projector and screen. The Juez was waiting for them, standing at his desk, hands planted as if he was thinking about bulldozing them straight back out into the hall.

18

Tuesday, 17th April 2001, Edificio de los Juzgados, Seville

Falcón and Ramírez turned off their mobiles and sat down in front of Calderón, who maintained his businesslike stance until they were comfortable. He lowered himself into his seat as if he was making a tremendous effort to contain his anger.

‘Proceed,’ he said, and steepled his fingers. ‘Let’s start with the latest on the prime suspect.’

‘We have had a major development in that respect,’ said Falcón, and Ramírez on cue slid the two ‘cleaned’ blow-ups of the suspected killer out of the file and handed them to Calderón. ‘We believe that this is our murderer.’

Calderón’s eyes widened as the two sheets came across the desk but regained their grimness when he saw that neither shot was conclusive. Falcón kept up a running commentary on how they’d come across the sighting. His voice seemed disembodied to him, as if he’d become non-human, a robotic word-generator. The bone-deep tiredness was separating him from himself. More phrases toppled from his mouth: ‘ … believed to be male in the age range twenty to forty years old …’ ‘… a further development …’ ‘… a pornographic video …’ ‘… confused our perception of the prime suspect …’ He
stopped only when Calderón put his hand up and read the report on the blue movie. The hand dropped. Falcón’s tape started up again, and he wondered how many words a human uttered in a lifetime. ‘The prostitute Eloisa Gómez …’ ‘… missing since last Friday night …’ ‘… contact has been made …’ ‘… stolen mobile …’ ‘… feared murdered …’ All this so long ago and yet so recent, he thought. And the investigation into Raúl Jiménez’s private life — the abduction of the boy, the wife’s suicide, the daughter’s madness, the son’s neurosis — a different century, which of course it was. Everything is from a different century now. A great tranche of history has been set adrift, so that we can begin a new accumulation of wrongs without reference …

‘Inspector Jefe,’ said Calderón, ‘your speculation on history is not germane to this investigation.’

‘It isn’t?’ he said, and from his sudden fear that he’d been caught leaking came what he hoped was inspiration. ‘Motive is always historical, unless it’s psychotic. The only question is: how far back do we have to go? Last month, when Raúl Jiménez tried to sell his restaurant business to Joaquín López? The last decade, when he was presiding over the Expo ‘92 Building Committee? Or thirty-six years ago, when his son was abducted.’

‘Let’s concentrate on what we have before us,’ said Calderón. ‘You are an Inspector Jefe with five men under you; there’s a limit to what you can achieve with those resources. You have pursued the available leads. You have achieved things — this sighting, for instance. But the most important thing is the apparent audacity of the killer and his inclination to communicate with you. As you have said, in being bold he is making mistakes, which in the case of the funeral was nearly fatal for him. He is sending things to you. He is talking to you.’

‘In the light of Consuelo Jiménez’s reaction to the
pornographic movie, are you proposing that we drop our prime suspect?’ asked Ramírez. ‘And wait for the killer to talk to us?’

‘No, Inspector, Consuelo Jiménez provides a focus for the investigation. She is all we’ve got. We believe the killer was not known to the victim. At the moment there are two people with possible motives: Joaquín López of the Cinco Bellotas chain, whose motive is very weak; and Consuelo Jiménez, whose motive is a classic, almost a stereotype. Given her reaction to the video, as described by the Inspector Jefe, she is looking less likely, but this does not take her completely out of the frame. She has done enough to make you believe her capable of at least being ruthless. She seems to have been rather disgusted by her husband’s sexual interests and his business infidelity. She has not done enough to make me believe that she couldn’t possibly have hired someone to carry out this gruesome business. And, if she did hire him, and he has now killed his accomplice, it may be that she has made a poor choice, because he seems to be off the leash.’

‘Do you think we should attempt to communicate with him?’ asked Falcón.

‘And what are we going to say to this
tío?’
asked Ramírez.

‘Let’s profile him … now,’ said Calderón.

‘I’ve already said he’s bold and playful,’ said Falcón. ‘I’d like to add creative. He’s into film, the idea of the eye, sight and vision. He’s interested in the way we look at things. How clearly we do or don’t see them — the sight lesson.’

‘There’s going to be more of those,’ said Calderón.

‘He’s also interested in the way we present ourselves to the world and how at odds this is with our secret lives and possibly our secret history.’

‘He does his research,’ said Ramírez, ‘filming the
Familia Jiménez, discovering the change in the move at Mudanzas Triana.’

‘He must have charm, maybe good looks and an understanding of the unfortunates of this world if he’s capable of persuading Eloisa Gómez to be an accomplice,’ said Falcón. ‘A woman like her really doesn’t need visits from the police and she must have known she was going to get them, even if he told her he was just going to steal a few things.’