‘Nobody could have survived that collapse,’ he said. ‘We’re praying for miracles here.’
‘Why are you so certain that this couldn’t have been a gas explosion?’
‘Apart from the fact that there’s been no reported leak, and we’ve only had to deal with two small fires, the mosque in the basement is in daily use. Gas is heavier than air and would accumulate at the lowest point. A large enough quantity of gas couldn’t have accumulated without anybody noticing,’ he said. ‘Added to that, the gas would have had to collect in a big enough space before exploding. Its power would be dissipated. Our main problem would have been incendiary, rather than destruction. There would have been a massive fireball, which would have scorched the whole area. There would have been burns victims. A bomb explodes from a small, confined source. It therefore has far more concentrated destructive power. Only a very large bomb, or several smaller bombs, could have taken out those reinforced concrete supporting pillars. Most of the dead and injured we’ve seen so far have been hit by flying debris and glass. All the windows in the area have been blown out. It’s all consistent with a bomb blast.’
At the edge of the destruction the light was bruised and sickly yellow. The pulverized brick and concrete formed a fine dust, which clogged the throat and nostrils with the stench of decay. From within the stacked floors came the repetitive, desperate sounds of mobile phone jingles, the same customized tunes begging to be answered. Here, rather than being an irritant, they had personality. The Fire Chief shook his head.
‘It’s the worst thing,’ he said, ‘listening to someone else’s hope fading away.’
Falcón almost jumped as his own mobile vibrated against his thigh.
‘Manuela,’ he said, walking away from the Fire Chief.
‘Are you all right, little brother?’ she asked.
‘Yes, but I’m busy.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Just tell me one thing. Was it a bomb?’
‘We’ve had no confirmation—’
‘I don’t want the official communiqué,’ she said. ‘I’m your sister.’
‘I don’t want Angel running off to the ABC with a quote from the Inspector Jefe at the scene.’
‘This is for my ears only.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Just tell me, Javier.’
‘We think it was a bomb.’
‘Fuck.’
Falcón hung up in a fury without saying goodbye. Men, women and children had died and been injured. Families had been destroyed, along with homes and possessions. But Manuela still needed to know which way the property market was going to tip.
Seville—Tuesday, 6th June 2006, 09.45 hrs
A figure sprinted between Falcón and the Fire Chief as he closed down his mobile. The man stumbled into the rubble at the foot of the fallen building, picked himself up and ran at the stacked pancakes of the reinforced concrete floors. His scale was strangely diminished by the vastness of the collapse. He seemed like a puppet as he dithered to the left and right, trying to find a purchase point in the tangle of cracked concrete, bristling steel rods, ruptured netting and shattered brick.
The Fire Chief shouted at him. He didn’t hear. He plunged his hands into the wreckage, swung his body up and hooked his leg over a thick steel rod, but he was a horribly human mixture of crazed strength overwhelmed by futility.
By the time they got to him he was hanging helpless, his palms already torn and bloody, his face distorted by the rawness of his pain. They lifted him off his ghastly perch, like soldiers removing a comrade from the wire of the front line. No sooner had they got him down than he recovered his strength and lunged at the building once more. Falcón had to tackle him around the legs to hold him back. They scrabbled over the rubble, like an ancient articulated insect, until Falcón managed to crawl up the man’s body and clasp his arms to his chest.
‘You can’t go in there,’ he said, his voice rasping from the dust.
The man grunted and flexed his arms against Falcón’s embrace. His mouth was wide open, his eyes stared into the mangled mess of the building and sweat beaded in fat drops on his filthy face.
‘Who do you know who is in there?’ asked Falcón.
On the back of the man’s grunting came two words—wife, daughter.
‘Which floor?’ asked the Fire Chief.
The man looked up at them blinking, as if this question demanded some complicated differential calculus.
‘Gloria,’ said the man. ‘Lourdes.’
‘But which floor?’ asked the Fire Chief.
The man’s head went limp, all fight gone. Falcón released him and rolled him on to his back.
‘Do you know anybody else in there, apart from Gloria and Lourdes?’ asked Falcón.
The man’s head listed to one side, and his dark eyes took in the damaged end of the pre-school. He sat up, got to his feet and trod robotically through the rubble and household detritus between the apartment block and the pre-school. Falcón followed. The man stood at the point where there should have been a wall. The classroom was a turmoil of broken furniture and shards of glass, and on the far wall fluttering in a breeze were children’s paintings—big suns, mad smiles, hair standing on end.
The man’s feet crunched through the glass. He tripped and fell heavily over a twisted desk, but righted himself immediately and made for the paintings. He pulled one off the wall and looked at it with the intensity of a collector judging a masterpiece. There was a tree, a sun, a high building and four people—two big, two small. In the bottom right-hand corner was a name written in an adult hand—Pedro. The man folded it carefully and put it inside his shirt.
The three men went into the main corridor of the school and out through the entrance. The local police had arrived and were trying to clear a path for the ambulance to remove the four bodies of the dead children taken from the destroyed classroom. Two of the mothers kneeling at the feet of their children gave a hysterical howl at this latest development. The third mother had already been taken away.
A woman with a thick white bandage on the side of her face, through which the blood underneath was just beginning to bloom, recognized the man.
‘Fernando,’ she said.
The man turned to her, but didn’t recognize her.
‘I’m Marta, Pedro’s teacher,’ she said.
Fernando had lost the power of speech. He took the painting out of his shirt and pointed at the smallest figure. Marta’s motor reflexes seemed to malfunction and she couldn’t swallow what was in her throat, nor articulate what was in her mind. Instead her face just caved in and she only managed to squeeze out a sound of such brutality and ugliness that it left Fernando’s chest shuddering. It was a sound uncontrolled by any civilizing influence. It was grief in its purest form, before its pain had been made less acute by time or more poignant by poetry. It was a dark, guttural, heaving clot of emotion.
Fernando was not affronted. He folded the painting up and put it back in his shirt. Falcón led him by the arm to the four small bodies. The ambulance was backing up, the rest of