On the other side of the rubble, further down Calle Los Romeros, was the Fire Chief’s car but no sign of any officers. Falcón walked along the collapsed wall and made his way around the block to see what had happened to the pre-school. The end of the building closest to the explosion had lost two walls, part of the roof had collapsed and the rest was hanging, ready to drop. Firemen and civilians were propping the roof, while unblinking women stared on in appalled silence, hands holding their faces as if to stop them from dropping off in disbelief.
On the other side, at the entrance to the school, it was worse. Four small bodies lay side by side, their faces covered with school pinafores. A large group of men and women were trying to control two of the mothers of the dead children. Covered in dust they were like ghosts, fighting for the right to go back to the living. The women were screaming hysterically and clawing madly against hands trying to prevent them from reaching the inert bodies. Another woman had fainted and was lying on the ground, surrounded by people kneeling to protect her from the swaying and surging crowd. Falcón looked around for a teacher and saw a young woman sitting on a mat of broken glass, blood trickling down the side of her face, weeping uncontrollably, while a friend tried to console the inconsolable. A paramedic arrived to give her wounds some temporary dressing.
‘Are you a teacher?’ asked Falcón, of the woman’s friend. ‘Do you know where the mother of the fourth child is?’
The woman, dazed, looked across at the collapsed apartment block.
‘She’s in there somewhere,’ she said, shaking her head.
Only firemen moved around inside the pre-school, their boots crunching over debris and glass. More props came in to support the shattered roof. The Fire Chief was in an undamaged classroom at the back of the school, giving a report to the Mayor’s office on his mobile.
‘All gas and electricity to the area has been cut off and the damaged building has been evacuated. Two fires have been brought under control,’ he said. ‘We’ve pulled four dead children out of the pre-school. Their classroom was in the direct path of the explosion and took its full force. So far we’ve had reports of three other deaths: two men and a woman who were walking along Calle Los Romeros when the explosion occurred. My men have also found a woman who seems to have died from a heart attack in one of the apartment blocks opposite the destroyed building. It’s too difficult to say how many wounded there are at the moment.’
He listened for a moment longer and closed down the phone. Falcón showed his ID.
‘You’re here very early, Inspector Jefe,’ said the Fire Chief.
‘I was in the Forensic Institute. It sounded like a bomb from there. Is that what you think?’
‘To do that sort of damage, there’s no doubt in my mind that it was a bomb, and a very powerful one at that.’
‘Any idea how many people were in that building?’
‘I’ve got one of my officers working on that at the moment. There were at least seven,’ he said. ‘The only thing we can’t be sure of is how many were in the mosque in the basement.’
‘The mosque?’
‘That’s the other reason why I’m sure this was a bomb,’ said the Fire Chief. ‘There was a mosque in the basement, with access from Calle Los Romeros. We think that morning prayers had just finished, but we’re not sure if anyone had left. We’re getting conflicting reports on that from the outside.’
Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 08.25 hrs
Desperation had brought Consuelo to Calle Vidrio early. The children were being taken to school by her neighbour. Now she was sitting in her car outside Alicia Aguado’s consulting room, getting cold feet about the emergency appointment she’d arranged only twenty-five minutes earlier. She walked the street to calm her nerves. She was not someone who had things wrong with her.
At precisely 8.30 a.m., having stared at the second hand of her watch, chipping away at the seconds—which showed her how obsessive she was becoming—she rang the doorbell. Dr Aguado was waiting for her, as she had been for many months. She was excited at the prospect of this new patient. Consuelo walked up the narrow stairs to the consulting room, which had been painted a pale blue and was kept at a constant temperature of 22°C.
Although Consuelo knew everything about Alicia Aguado, she let the clinical psychologist explain that she was now blind due to a degenerative disease called retinitis pigmentosa and that as a result of this disability she had developed a unique technique of reading a patient’s pulse.
‘Why do you need to do that?’ asked Consuelo, knowing the answer, but wanting to put off the moment when they got down to work.
‘Because I’m blind I miss out on the most important indicators of the human body, which is physiognomy. We speak more to each other with our features and bodies than we do with our mouths. Think how little you would glean from a conversation just by hearing words. Only if someone was in an extreme state, such as fear or anxiety, would you understand what they were feeling, whereas if you have a face and body you pick up on a whole range of subtleties. You can tell the difference between someone who is lying, or exaggerating, someone who’s bored, and someone who wants to go to bed with you. Reading the pulse, which I learnt from a Chinese doctor and have adapted to my needs, enables me to pick up on nuance.’
‘That sounds like an intelligent way of saying that you’re a human polygraph.’
‘I don’t just detect lies,’ said Aguado. ‘It’s more to do with undercurrents. Translating feeling into language can defeat even the greatest of writers, so why should it be any easier for an ordinary person to tell me about their emotions, especially if they’re in a confused state?’
‘This is a beautiful room,’ said Consuelo, already shying away from some of the words she’d heard in Aguado’s explanation. Undercurrents reminded her of her fears, of being dragged out into the ocean to die of exhaustion alone in a vast heaving expanse.
‘There was too much noise,’ said Aguado. ‘You know how it is in Seville. Noise was becoming so much of a distraction for me, in my state, that I had the room double-glazed and soundproofed. It used to be white, but I think my patients found white as intimidating as black. So I opted for tranquil blue. Let’s sit down, shall we?’
They sat in the S-shaped lovers’ seat, facing each other. She showed Consuelo the tape recorder in the armrest, explaining that it was the only way for her to review her consultations. Aguado asked her to introduce herself, give her age and any medication she was on so that she could check it was recording properly.
‘Can you give me a brief medical history?’
‘Since when?’
‘Anything significant since you were born—operations, serious illnesses, children…that sort of thing.’
Consuelo tried to drink the tranquillity of the pale blue walls into her mind. She had been hoping for some miraculous surgical strike on her mental disturbances, a fabulous technique to yank open the tangled mess and smooth it out into comprehensible strands. In her turmoil it hadn’t occurred to her that this was going to be a process, an intrusive process.
‘You seem to be struggling with this question,’ said Aguado.
‘I’m just coming to terms with the fact that you’re going to turn me inside out.’
‘Nothing leaves this room,’ said Aguado. ‘We can’t even be heard. The tapes are locked up in a safe in my office.’
‘It’s not that,’ said Consuelo.