The Blind Man of Seville (7 page)

‘People have killed for less.’

‘I
gave you that motive. There’s no one who could have told you that Raúl Jiménez didn’t love me.’

‘What about Basilio Lucena?’

‘He only knows that Raúl was impotent and that I have physical needs.’

‘Do you know where he was last night?’

‘Ah, yes, of course. It would be the lover who would do the deed,’ she said. ‘You’ll meet Basilio and then you must tell me what you think he’s capable of.’

They passed the Basilica de La Macarena and a few
minutes later pulled up by an austere grey building on Avenida Sánchez Pizjuan that housed the Instituto Anatómico Forense. A crowd of people were gathered outside the doors. Falcón parked up inside the hospital barrier. Consuelo Jiménez put on a pair of sunglasses. The crowd were on them as soon as they got out of the car, Dictaphones pointing. Loose words blasted out from the cacophony and cut like shrapnel —
‘marido’, ‘asesinado’, ‘brutalmente’.
Falcón took her by the arm and pushed past them, got her through the door and slammed it behind him.

He walked her through the corridors to the office of the Médico Forense, who took them to the viewing room. The official pulled back the curtain and, beyond the glass panel, lit from above, lay Raúl Jiménez under a sheet that was pulled down over his chest. Two candles burned by his head. His eyes, clean of blood, stared up at the ceiling. There was nothing in them. The back of his head, previously matted with gore, had been washed clean. The nose had been miraculously reattached and the scarring from the flex on his cheeks had gone. The old wound to his right pectoral, seen in the photograph, now looked like the worst thing his body had suffered. Consuelo Jiménez formally identified the body. The curtain was closed. Falcón asked her to wait while he had a short discussion with the Médico Forense, who told him that Raúl Jiménez had died at three in the morning. He had suffered a brain haemorrhage and heart failure. There was an extremely high level of Viagra in his blood. It was the doctor’s conclusion that the increased blood pressure and high degree of distress combined with the clogged condition of the victim’s arteries had caused Raúl Jiménez to more or less internally burst. He gave Falcón his official typed report.

They ran the gauntlet to the car and rather than go
back through the barrier, which was blocked by the journalists, he headed through the grounds of the faculty and out past the main hospital building on to Calle de San Juan de Ribera.

‘They should have closed his eyes,’ said Consuelo Jiménez. ‘You cannot be at peace with your eyes still open, even if they don’t see anything.’

‘They couldn’t close his eyes,’ he said as the traffic lights released them to turn left on to Calle Muñoz León.

He drove past the old city walls and found a parking space in the busy street. Sra Jiménez clung to the roof grip, her knuckles whitening, her face already beginning to shrink from the words that she knew were coming her way. The worst of his career.

He told her how it was, with no soft focus, giving his own appalled version. Yes, it had been the worst of his career. There were scenes he’d had to ‘process’ which perhaps sounded worse — walking into an apartment in a high-rise block in an
urbanización
on the outskirts of Madrid, four dead in the sitting room, blood up the walls, two dead in the kitchen, needles, syringes, tinfoil floating on gore and, in the bedroom, a child whimpering on a soiled cot. But that was all expected horror in a culture of brutality. The torture of Raúl Jiménez was something he could not be objective about and not just because he was sensitive about eyes, which were so important to his work. It was how the killer’s punishment of his victim had worked on his own imagination. It terrified him, the notion of the sheer relentlessness of reality, the lack of visual respite. As Sra Jiménez had noted, not even in death could he be seen to enjoy the big sleep but had to lie in eternal, wide-eyed horror at man’s capacity for evil.

Sra Jiménez had started crying. Really crying. This was no dabbing at the mascara but a bawling, retching, snot-streaked breakdown. Javier Falcón understood the cruelty
of police work. He was not the man to comfort this woman. It was he who had put the images in her head. His job, the point of his job at this moment, was to observe not just the veracity of the emotional display but also to perceive the opening, the crack in the carapace where he would jam in his lever. It had been his conscious tactic to get her in a car, in an enclosed bubble in a busy street with nowhere to go, while an indifferent world crashed by, oblivious to the enormity.

‘You were in the Hotel Colón last night?’ he said and she nodded. ‘Were you alone after your children had gone to bed?’

She shook her head.

‘Was Basilio Lucena with you last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘All night?’

‘No.’

‘What time did he leave?’

‘We had dinner in the room. We went to bed. He must have left by two o’clock.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘Home, I suppose.’

‘He didn’t go to the Edificio Presidente?’

Silence. No answer, while Falcón looked into the structure of her face.

‘What does Basilio Lucena do for a living?’ he asked.

‘Something useless at the university. He’s a lecturer.’

‘What department?’

‘One of the sciences. Biology or chemistry — I can’t remember. We never talked about it. It doesn’t interest him. It’s a position and a salary, that’s all.’

‘Did you give him a key?’

‘To the
apartment?’
she said, shaking her head at him. ‘Meet Basilio before you even …’

‘How do you know I haven’t?’

Silence.

‘Have you been in touch with Basilio Lucena this morning?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘What did you tell him?’

‘I thought he should know what had happened.’

‘So that he could prepare himself?’

‘You might think, Inspector Jefe, if you saw Basilio Lucena on paper that he was an intelligent man. He is certainly educated and sophisticated. But his intelligence is very finely tuned to a narrow waveband and his sophistication admired by a small clique. He has been made lazy by the lack of challenge in his job. His house and car have been paid for by his parents. He has no dependants. His income allows him an irresponsible lifestyle. He isn’t somebody who’s ever had to think on his feet because most of the time he’s lying down. Is that the profile of a murderer?’

Falcón’s mobile rang. Pérez made an elaborate report on the unidentified people picked up by the CCTV cameras. Two positive identifications, one negative, and the girl they assumed to be the prostitute had been referred to Vice. He told Pérez to follow up on the girl and asked Fernández to go through the apartments again over lunchtime.

The moment with Consuelo Jiménez had passed. He pulled out into the traffic, did a U-turn and headed west to the river. He glanced at his hostage to see how her thoughts were progressing. He sensed a crisis point, began to have that feeling that this could all be over before his first meeting with Juez Calderón. That was how this work went in his experience. All over in twenty-four hours or they went into months of long, bleak slog.

‘Are you taking me back to the apartment?’ she asked.

‘You’re an intelligent woman, Doña Consuelo.’

‘Your opportunity to flatter me has long passed.’

‘You spend your life amongst people,’ he said. ‘You understand them. I think you understand the demands of my job.’

‘That you have to be so disgustingly suspicious.’

‘Do you know how many murders there are in Seville every year?’

‘In this city of joy?’ she said. ‘In this city of handclapping in the streets, of
cervecitas y tapitas con los amigos.
In this city
de los guapos, de los guapísimos?
In this godly city of the Holy Virgin?’

‘In the city of Seville.’

‘A couple of thousand,’ she said, tossing the number up into the air with her ringed fingers.

‘Fifteen,’ he said.

‘Back-stabbing is metaphorical murder.’

‘Drugs account for most of those murders. The remaining few come under the heading of “domestic” or “passionate”. In
all
of those murders —
all
of them, Doña Consuelo — the victim and the perpetrator knew each other and in most cases they were intimate.’

‘Then you have an exception, Inspector Jefe, because
I
did not kill my husband.’

They went through the underpass by the old railway station at the Plaza de Armas and continued along the riverside on the Paseo Cristóbal Colón past the Maestranza bullring, the Opera and the Torre del Oro. The sun was bright on the water, the high plane trees in full leaf. It was no time to be confessing to murder and spending a lifetime of springs behind bars.

‘Denial is a very powerful human condition … ‘ he said.

‘I wouldn’t know, I’ve never denied anything.’

‘… because there are no doubts … ever.’

‘I’m either a liar or completely deluded,’ she said. ‘I
can’t win, Inspector Jefe. But at least I always tell myself the truth.’

‘But do you tell it to me, Doña Consuelo?’ he said.

‘So far … but perhaps I’m changing my mind.’

‘I don’t know how you persuaded your husband’s old flames that you were a silly tart.’

‘I dressed like one,’ she said, tinkling her fingernails. ‘I can talk like one, too.’

‘You’re an accomplished actress.’

‘Everything counts against me.’

Their eyes connected. His soft, brown, tobacco. Hers frozen aquamarine. He smiled. He couldn’t help liking her. That strength. The inexorable mouth. He wondered what it would taste like and shot the thought straight out of his head. They crossed the Puente del Generalísimo and he changed the subject.

‘It’s never occurred to me before what a Francoist little corner of town this is. This bridge. This street is named after Carrero Blanco …’

‘Why do you think my husband was living in the Edificio Presidente?’

‘I thought most people were following the Paquirri fashion.’

‘Yes, well, my husband liked
los toros,
but he liked Franco even more.’

‘And you?’

‘He was before my time.’

‘Mine, too.’

‘You should dye your hair, Inspector Jefe, I thought you were older.’

They parked up. Falcón called Fernández on his mobile, told him to go to the Jiménez apartment. He and Sra Jiménez took the lift to the sixth floor, nodded past the policeman at the door. They paced the empty corridor towards the empty hook, that double walk still snagging
in Falcón’s brain. They sat down in the study and waited in silence for Fernández to arrive.

‘Just run your pictures past Sra Jiménez, please,’ he said. ‘In order of appearance on the CCTV tapes.’

Fernández counted them out, each one getting the negative from Consuelo Jiménez until the last one when her eyes widened and she blinked the double take.

‘Who is that in the picture, Doña Consuelo?’

She looked up at him, entranced, beguiled as if it had been magic.

‘It’s Basilio,’ she said, her mouth not closing.

5

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

How to play this? Falcón resisted the temptation to run his fingers up the edge of the desk like a concert pianist in full flourish. He rested his chin on his thumb, tensed his jaw and brushed his cheekbone with a finger while the adrenalin flashed down his arteries. This was it, he thought. But how to make it come out? Separate or together? He felt inspired. He decided on the cockpit approach. Throw them in together, let them flap and cut, peck and stab.

‘Sra Jiménez and I are going to El Porvenir,’ he said to Fernández. ‘Contact Sub Inspector Pérez and help him find the prostitute. Tell him we’ve identified the unknowns from the CCTV tapes.’

Sra Jiménez crossed her legs, lit a cigarette. Her foot wouldn’t keep still. Falcón went into the corridor to call Ramírez on his mobile. He wished he liked him more.

Ramírez was bored. He’d taken on the fruitless task of interviewing the fired employees himself and, so far, after two had come up with nothing other than they were glad to get away from Sra Jiménez. Falcón watched her while Ramírez blew off steam. She was clicking the
fingernails of her thumb and forefinger, playing things over in her mind. Falcón briefed Ramírez and gave him Basilio Lucena’s address, told him to get down there and be ready to maintain the pressure on the two protagonists.

Falcón took Consuelo Jiménez back across the river to 17 Calle Río de la Plata. The traffic was heavier around lunchtime. The joggers were out in the park; girls with their hair tied in ponytails bobbed along beyond the railings, gay in the sunshine. These moments of police work were fascinating to him — driving along while a suspect endured some massive internal struggle between denial and truth, between acting out the lie or embracing the relief of retribution and absolution. Where did the impulse come from that started the body chemistry into a decision of such magnitude?

He turned right up Avenida de Portugal behind the high towers of the Plaza de España. The building which had been the centrepiece of the ‘29 Expo was so normal to him that he wouldn’t have noticed it except, on this day, with the red brick against the blue sky and the explosive greenery all around, it amazed him. It brought back a memory of his father throwing himself out of his seat as they watched
Lawrence of Arabia
on television to point out that David Lean was using the building as the British Embassy in Cairo.

‘You can talk if you like,’ he said.

She started out aggressive and pulled back after the first syllable. She found a lipstick in her handbag and reshaped her mouth … nicely.

‘I’m as curious as you are,’ she said, which unnerved him.

They parked down the street from the house. No Ramírez. Falcón took out the autopsy report and read it through, blinking in the detail. The instruments used, the technical know-how demonstrated, the chemicals and
solutions evident on the victim’s clothes — all reaffirmed his suspicions.