The Blind Man of Seville (6 page)

‘Is it you or your husband who has the enemies?’

‘I am perceived as undeserving, as a rider on my husband’s coat-tails, as someone who would have failed in life were it not for Raúl Jiménez. But they will see,’ she said, her jaw muscle tensing in her cheek. ‘They will see.’

‘Were you aware of the contents of your husband’s will?’

‘I never saw him sign one, but I knew of his intentions,’ she said. ‘Everything would be left to me and the children and there would be some provision made for his daughter, his
hermandad
and his favourite charity.’

‘What was that?’

‘Nuevo Futuro, and the particular part of it that interested him was
Los Niños de la Calle.’

‘Street children?’

‘Why not?’

‘People support charities for reasons. A wife dies of cancer, the husband puts money into cancer research.’

‘He said that he began contributing after a trip to Central America. He was very moved by the plight of children orphaned by the civil wars in those countries.’

‘Perhaps he himself was orphaned by the Civil War.’

She shrugged. Falcón’s pen hovered over his notebook where the word
putas
was underscored.

‘And the prostitutes?’ he said, punching the word out into the room. ‘You haven’t seen the section of the video where your husband is filmed frequenting the Alameda. He could have afforded better in less dangerous surroundings. Why do you think …?’

‘Don’t ask me why men go to prostitutes,’ she said, and, as an afterthought, ‘… his misery, I should think.’

‘And you can’t shed any light on that.’

‘People will only talk about those things if they want to, if they know how to. Something that could make my husband that wretched was probably buried so deep that he didn’t know it was there any more. It was just his condition. How would you start talking about something like that?’

Consuelo Jiménez’s words induced a trance in Falcón. His mind tumbled back over those first hours of the investigation and he hit that fear again, the surge of panic. He was on the walk down the corridor, the double walk, because it was his and the killer’s same strides towards that blank wall with its empty hook lit by the light from the horror room. Then the face, and the eyes in the face, and the terrifying relentlessness of what they’d seen.

‘Don Javier,’ she said, which snapped him back to reality because she hadn’t used his rank.

‘Please excuse me,’ he said. ‘I was lost. I mean I was elsewhere.’

‘It didn’t look like somewhere I would want to be,’ she said.

‘I was just running over some things in my mind.’

Then you must have seen some terrible things. You said yourself, about Raúl’s murder, the most extraordinary of your career.’

‘Yes, I did say that, but this wasn’t anything to do with that,’ he said, and found himself on the brink of a confession, which was not, he thought, a place the Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homicidios should ever be.

4

Thursday, 12th April 2001, Edificio Presidente, Los Remedios, Seville

He offered her a car. She turned him down and said she’d make her own way to her sister’s house. He asked for her sister’s details just to keep the pressure on, and reminded her that he would pick her up later to go to the Instituto Anatómico Forense for the identification of the body. He wanted to interview her then, once she’d been shocked out of any residual complacency by the sight of her husband’s dead body. He asked her to think about anything unusual in Raúl’s business or personal life in the last year and told her to call the restaurant to get the names and addresses of the three people who’d been fired for feeding her husband against orders. He knew they would be dead leads, but he wanted to induce a fear in her of his thoroughness. They shook hands at the door of the apartment; his were damp, hers dry and cool.

Ramírez followed him back into Raúl Jiménez’s study from the hall.

‘Did she do it,’ he asked, slumping into the high-backed chair, ‘or have it done, Inspector Jefe?’

Falcón turned his pen over and over in his fingers.

‘Any news from Pérez at the hospital?’ he asked.

‘The maid’s still out cold.’

‘And the CCTV tapes?’

‘Four people unidentified by the conserje. Two males. Two females. One of the females I would say is the whore, but she looks very young. Fernández has taken the tapes down to the station and we’ll get some digitalized printouts to show around the building.’

‘What about people leaving the building by alternative exits? The garage, for instance.’

‘Neither of those cameras are working. The conserje called the technicians this morning but they still haven’t arrived. Semana Santa, Inspector Jefe,’ he explained.

Falcón gave him the names and addresses of the fired employees and told him to have them interviewed as soon as possible. Ramírez left. Falcón picked up the photograph of Raúl Jiménez’s first wife — Gumersinda Bautista. He called the Jefatura and asked them to run a check on José Manuel Jiménez Bautista, born in Tangier in the late 1940s, early 1950s.

He sat back with the other photographs, flicked through the nameless people. He came across a shot of Raúl Jiménez on the deck of a yacht. He was barely recognizable. No hint of the toadiness to come. He was handsome and confident and stood as if he knew it, hands on hips, shoulders braced, chest puffed out. Falcón brushed his thumb over that chest, thinking there was a speck on the photograph. It stayed and on closer inspection looked to be some kind of wound to his right pectoral near the armpit. He flipped it over —
Tangier, July 1953
was written on the back.

His mobile rang. The police computer had come up with a Madrid address and telephone number for José Manuel Jiménez. He took them down and asked after Serrano and Baena, two other officers from his group. They were off for Semana Santa. He ordered them to be sent down to him at the Jiménez apartment.

Instead of reviewing his notes and planning his next assault on the cultivated defences of Doña Consuelo Jiménez, who, he couldn’t deny it, was still his prime suspect, he found himself reaching for the sheaf of old photographs. There were some group shots, again from Tangier, in 1954 according to the dates on the back. He looked over the faces, thinking that he was trying to find his father in there until he realized that he was concentrating more on the women and was wondering if his mother, who’d died seven years after these photographs were taken, was amongst these strangers. He was fascinated at the prospect of finding a shot of her he’d never seen, in the company of people he’d never heard of, in a time before he was born. Some of the faces were too small and grainy and he decided to take them home and look at them under his magnifying glass.

He took a cigarette from the pack of Celtas, sniffed it. He hadn’t smoked for fifteen years. He’d given up when he was thirty, on the same day he’d terminated his relationship of five years with Isabel Alamo. She’d been heartbroken, not least because she’d assumed their private talk was going to be a marriage proposal. In the ghastliness of that memory he broke off the filter, picked up the Bic and lit the cigarette. It was horrible even without inhaling and he set it down on the ashtray. He leaned back in the chair as his mind shot back to another memory back in Tangier on New Year’s Eve 1963. He was standing by the stairs in his pyjamas, waist height to all the leaving guests, who were going down to the port for the firework display. Mercedes, his second mother, his father’s second wife, picked him up and took him back upstairs to bed. This smell was in her hair, Celtas; somebody must have been smoking the same brand at the party. There were still plenty Of Spaniards in Tangier in those days, even though the really good times were long over. Mercedes
had put him to bed, kissed him hard, squeezed him to her bosom. He left the memory at that point. He never took it forward from there because … he just didn’t. He was interested to find that this new smell could take him back to that time. Normally he only ever thought of Mercedes when he came across Chanel No.5, her perfume of choice.

A knock at the door brought him back. Serrano and Baena stood in the corridor.

‘You were quick,’ said Falcón.

The two men shuffled in, uneasy with their boss who they assumed was being sarcastic. They’d been forty minutes.

‘Traffic,’ said Baena, which solved the problem both ways.

Falcón was mystified by the sight of the cigarette reduced to an ash snake in front of him. A glance at his watch left him stunned to find that it was past eleven o’clock and he’d achieved nothing. He checked his notes to see when Ramírez had timed the removals men’s lunch break and ordered Serrano and Baena to go out on the streets to try to find a witness who’d seen someone, probably in overalls, climbing up the lifting gear to the sixth floor of the Edificio Presidente.

Sub-Inspector Pérez called saying the maid, Dolores Oliva, had finally come round. She wouldn’t speak until she had a rosary in her hand and throughout the interview she fingered a key ring of the Virgen del Rocío. She was convinced she had come into contact with pure evil and that it might have found a way in. Falcón tapped the desk. It was always like this with Pérez. The academy and eleven years in the field had not been able to break down his need to tell a story in a report. It took eight minutes for him to reveal that Dolores Oliva had opened the door with five turns of the key.

Falcón cut Pérez off and told him to get down to Los Remedios as soon as possible to work the apartments in the block with the print-outs of the unidentified persons from the CCTV tapes. The prostitute had to be identified and found, too. He hung up and saw that there was a message for him from the Médico Forense saying that the autopsy was complete and a written report was being typed out. He thought for a moment about whether he should let Consuelo Jiménez see the body in its full horror and decided that it would be better to keep the eyelid removal as police information only. He called the Médico Forense back and asked him to make the body clean and presentable.

He arranged to pick up Consuelo Jiménez from her sister’s house in San Bernardo and went down to his car calling Fernández and telling him to make contact with Pérez to work the apartments.

It was fiercely bright outside after the darkness of the apartment and nearly warm. It was always the same around Semana Santa and the Feria, a most ambiguous time of year. Neither hot nor cold. Neither dry nor wet. Neither religious nor secular. He got into his car and threw the sheaf of old photographs on the seat. The one of Gumersinda, Raúl’s first wife, was on top. It was a formal shot and she was staring earnestly into the camera, but it was Consuelo Jiménez’s words that came to mind: ‘He totally failed to love me.’ Two bizarre thoughts clashed in his mind, squirting adrenalin into his system, which made him start the car and pull out without looking. Tyres squealed. A muffled shout of
‘Cabrón
!
‘
reached him.

He made a U-turn and crossed the river over the Puente del Generalísimo. The port railway tracks streamed beneath him and the cranes formed a guard of honour down to the massive Puente del V Centenario, which rose out of the urban mist. His thoughts burgeoned as he headed northeast past the Parque de María Luisa and he
desperately wanted that cigarette he’d let burn to ash in Raúl Jiménez’s study. What had come into his mind were the words of his wife, Inés, whom he, too, had failed to love: ‘You have no heart, Javier Falcón,’ and this had been entangled with the sight of Gumersinda, a woman from his mother’s era, which had made him think of his blood mother, Pilar, and then his stepmother, Mercedes. All these women, immensely important to him, he now thought he’d somehow failed.

The idea was so new and peculiar it made him quite desperate to be active and unconscious.

He sat at the traffic lights, his fingers jittering over the steering wheel, muttering: ‘This is madness’ because this did not happen to him. He did not have random inexplicable thoughts. He had never been by nature a day-dreamer. He had always been calm and methodical, which characteristics could not be applied to him now. From the moment he’d seen Raúl’s terrible face there’d been something no less cataclysmic than a genetic mutation. His mind was flooding with uncomfortable memories, sweat welled up from his forehead and dampened his hands, his concentration was shot. He hadn’t even got this investigation under control. He hadn’t checked the windows and doors out on to the balcony in the Jiménez apartment. First steps. And that business with the TV, yanking the cord out of the wall and not mentioning it. It was unprofessional. It was not him.

He cruised up Calle Balbino Murrón right to the end, to a building that overlooked the soccer pitch in the Colegio de los Jesuitas. He put the photos in the glove compartment. Consuelo Jiménez came out on her own before he reached the house. A child, probably the youngest, stood in the window. She waved and the boy waved frantically back. It saddened Falcón. He saw himself in the window, left behind.

They set off, cutting across the main arterial roads going into the centre of town. She looked straight ahead, not taking much in beyond the glass.

‘Have you told the children yet?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to tell them and then leave them to go to the hospital.’

‘They must know something is wrong.’

‘They see I’m nervous. They don’t know why they are with their aunt. They keep asking me why we aren’t in the house in Heliopolis and when is Daddy going to bring the present he promised.’

‘The dog?’

‘You can be quite impressive, Inspector Jefe,’ she said. ‘You don’t have children, do you?’

‘No … ‘ he said, wanting to fill that out somehow.

They continued in silence, heading north towards La Macarena.

‘How is the investigation going?’ she asked, polite, distant.

‘It’s early days.’

‘So you only have the obvious motive to go on.’

‘Which is?’

‘Wife wants to get rid of unloving older husband, inherit his fortune and disappear with younger lover.’