‘Surely, Inspector Jefe …’ she said.
‘No, never,’ he said, ‘because I’ve never met anybody with a perfect life. A perfect past and a pristine future, yes. But the perfect past is always brilliantly edited and the pristine future a hopeless dream. The only perfect life is the one on paper, and even then there are those spaces between the words and lines and they’re rarely patches of nothing.’
‘Yes, we are careful,’ she said, ‘careful of what we show to others and of what we reveal to ourselves.’
‘I didn’t mean to be so … intense,’ he said. ‘We’ve had a long day and there’s more to come. We’ve had some shocks.’
‘I can’t believe I’m still such an idiot,’ she said. ‘I met Basilio in the lift of the Edificio Presidente. He was probably on his way down from the eighth floor. I didn’t think. But … but why would he … bother to seduce me?’
‘Forget him. He’s not important.’
‘Unless he’s given me something.’
‘Take a test,’ said Falcón, more brutal than he intended. ‘But start thinking too, Doña Consuelo, about who could possibly have a motive for killing your husband. I want names and addresses of all his friends. I want you to remember, for instance, who it was who told you how much you resembled the first wife. I want Raúl’s diary.’
‘He had a desk diary in the office which I kept up. He threw away his address book when he got his mobile phone. He only spoke to people on the phone anyway. He had no use for paper and he always lost pens and stole mine.’
Falcón did not remember a mobile phone. He called the forensics and the Médico Forense. No mobile. The killer must have taken it.
‘Any other records?’
‘An old address book in the office computer.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Above the restaurant off the Plaza de Alfalfa.’
He handed her his mobile and asked her to arrange for him to pick up a print-out in half an hour.
He dropped her outside her sister’s house in San Bernardo just after 3 p.m. Ten minutes later he parked up by the east gate to the Jardines de Murillo and continued on foot, half running through the crowded streets of the Barrio de Santa Cruz, where tourists gathered for the Semana Santa processions. The sun was out from behind the clouds. It was hot and he was soon sweating. The air in the enclosed streets smelt strongly of Ducados, orange blossom, horseshit and the vestiges of incense from the processions. The cobbles were spattered and slippery with candle wax.
He stripped off his mac and cut down the backstreets he knew from the few times he’d managed to attend the English classes he kept paying for at the British Institute on Calle Frederico Rubio. He came into the southeast corner of the Plaza de Alfalfa, which was packed with all the tribes of the world. Cameras nosed at him. He sidestroked through the crowd, trotted up Calle San Juan and was suddenly carried forward by a crush of people surging down Calle Boteros. He realized his mistake too late, saw the procession coming towards him, but couldn’t break free of the herd. They bore him onwards to the flower-decked float, which had just negotiated a difficult corner and was now beetling forward under the power of the twenty costaleros underneath. The Virgin, demure beneath her white lace canopy, was shimmering in the intense sunlight, while incense from the burners shifted this way and that in the thermals of the street, filling his head and chest so that air was difficult to come by. The drums from the band behind the float beat on, hammering out their portentous rhythm.
The crowd shoved forwards. The paso bore down on their awestruck faces, the Virgin towering above them, her whole body shuddering from right to left under the straining costaleros. Earsplitting, discordant trumpets suddenly blasted out the passion. The sound in the confines of the narrow street reverberated inside Falcón’s chest and seemed to open it up. The crowd gasped at the glorious moment, at the weeping Virgin, at the height of ecstasy … and the blood drained rapidly from Falcón’s head.
Thursday, 12th April 2001, Calle Boteros, Seville
The paso veered away. The high Virgin’s pitiful eyes moved off, fell on others. The crush slackened. The final blast of the trumpets ricocheted off the balconies. The drums beat out to silence. The costaleros lowered the float from their shoulders. The crowd clapped at their feat of engineering. The procession of nazareños in their high-pointed hats put down their crosses, rested their candles. Falcón held on to the handle at the back of an old woman’s wheelchair, a hand on his knee. The old woman was waving at one of the nazareños, who’d lifted the flap of his hood. He smiled, revealing the normal human being beneath, nothing more sinister than a bespectacled accountant.
Falcón loosened his tie, wiped cold sweat from his face. He pushed through the edge of the crowd, staggered through the files of nazareños. The people on the other side parted for him. He found some pavement and bent his head to his knees, felt the blood thump back up his cerebral cortex, refresh his brain.
Haven’t eaten all day, he was thinking, but he knew that wasn’t it. He looked back at the paso, the Virgin staring off down the street, unconcerned with him now. Except, this was it … she had been. For that moment, for that fraction of a second, she’d got inside him, filled him out. It had been an experience he could nearly remember having had before, but he couldn’t quite get to the memory of it. It was too distant.
He found the office above the Jiménez restaurant, picked up the print-out and drank a glass of water. He left the old city, avoiding all processions. He drove down to the river and crossed over to the Plaza de Cuba feeling empty and hungry. He stopped at a bar on República Argentina and bought a bocadillo de chorizo, which he ate too quickly so that it stuck in his chest, the crust as hard-edged as the pain of loss, which was odd because he hadn’t lost anyone since his father died two years ago.
The Jefatura was on the intersection of Calle Blas Infante and Calle López de Gomara. He parked at the back of the building and made his way up the two short flights of stairs to his office, which had a view over the ordered ranks of cars. His office was spartan with not one personal item in it. There were two chairs, a metal desk and some grey filing cabinets. The light came from a neon strip above his head. He did not hold with distractions at work.
There were thirty-eight messages for him and five were from his immediate superior Jefe de Brigada de Policía Judicial, Comisario Andrés Lobo, who was no doubt reacting to pressure from his boss Comisario Firmin León, whose relationship with Raúl Jiménez Falcón had noted from the photographs. He went straight to the interrogation rooms, where Ramírez was standing over Basilio Lucena, holding his fist as if he wanted to punch him. He called Ramírez out, briefed him on the interrogation strategy for the girl and told him to send Pérez down. He went in to see Lucena who looked up and went straight back to writing his statement.
‘What you said to Inspector Ramírez back there …’ Falcón started, the nastiness of that line still bothering him.
‘Any student will tell you that lecturers react very badly to morons.’
‘Was that all it was?’
‘I’m surprised you’re concerned, Inspector Jefe.’
He was, too, and wondered if he was making a fool of himself.
‘I doubt my mother was ever as good in bed as Consuelo, if that’s what you were wondering,’ said Lucena.
‘You’re a confusing man, Sr Lucena.’
‘In