‘Did you find who you were looking for?’ asked Sra Jiménez from behind him.
She was out of her coat, wearing a black cardigan and leaning against a guest chair. Her eyes were pink-rimmed despite the make-up repair.
‘I’m sorry you saw that,’ he said, nodding at the television.
‘I’d been warned,’ she said, taking a packet of Marlboro Lights out of her cardigan pocket and lighting one with a Bic from the desk. She threw the pack on the desk, offering him one. He shook his head. Falcón was used to this ritual sizing up. He didn’t mind. It gave him time, too.
He saw a woman about the same age as himself and well groomed, maybe over groomed. There was a lot of jewellery on her fingers whose nails were too long and too pink. Her earrings clustered on her lobes, winking from the nest of her blonde helmet. The make-up, even for a repair job, was heavily slapped on. The cardigan was the only simple thing about her. The black dress would have worked well had it not had a hem of lace which, rather than bringing grief to mind, brought sex awkwardly into contention. She had square shoulders and an uplifted bust and was full-bodied with no extra fat. There was something of the health club fitness regime about her, the way the straps of muscle in her neck framed her larynx and her calf muscles were delineated beneath her black stockings. She was what the English would call handsome.
She saw a fit man in a perfectly cut suit with all his hair, which had gone prematurely grey but belonged to a class of person who would never think of returning it to its original black. He wore lace-up shoes and the tightness of the bows led her to believe that this was someone who rarely unbuttoned his jacket. The handkerchief in his breast pocket she assumed was always there but never used. She imagined that he had a lot of ties and that he wore them all the time, even at weekends, possibly in bed. She saw a man who was contained, trussed and bound. He did not give out, which may have been a professional attitude but she thought not. She did not see a Sevillano, not a natural one anyway.
‘You said earlier, Doña Consuelo, that you and your husband had few secrets.’
‘We should sit,’ she said, pointing him into her husband’s desk chair with her cigarette fingers and pivoting the guest chair round with some dexterity. She sat quickly, slipped sideways on to one of the arms and crossed her legs so that the lace hem rode up her calf.
‘Are you married, Inspector Jefe?’
‘This is an investigation into your husband’s murder,’ he said flatly.
‘It’s relevant.’
‘I was married,’ he said.
She smoked and counted her fingers with her thumb.
‘You didn’t need to tell me that,’ she said. ‘You could have left it at “Yes”.’
‘These are games we should not be playing,’ he said. ‘Every hour that goes past takes us an hour away from your husband’s death. These hours are important. They count more than the hours, say, in three or four days’ time.’
‘You’ve separated from your wife?’ she said.
‘Doña Consuelo …’
‘I’ll be quick,’ she said, and batted the smoke away from between them.
‘We are separated.’
‘After how long?’
‘Eighteen months.’
‘How did you meet her?’
‘She’s a public prosecutor. I met her at the Palacio de Justicia.’
‘So, a union of truth hunters,’ she said, and Falcón searched her for irony.
‘We are not making progress, Doña Consuelo.’
‘I think we are.’
‘I might be satisfying your curiosity …’
‘It’s more than curiosity.’
‘You are reversing the procedure. It is I who have to find out about you.’
‘To see whether I killed my husband,’ she said. ‘Or had him killed.’
Silence.
‘You see, Inspector Jefe, you’re going to find out everything about us, you’re going to dig into our lives. You’re going to strip down my husband’s business affairs, you’re going to probe his private life, uncover his little uglinesses — his blue movies, his cheap whores, his cheap … cheap cigarettes.’
She leaned over and picked up the pack of Celtas and threw them across the desk so that they skidded into Falcón’s lap.
‘And you won’t let me alone. I’ll be your prime suspect. You saw that horrible thing,’ she said, waving at the television behind her.
‘Number 17 Calle Río de la Plata?’
‘Exactly. My lover, Inspector Jefe. You’ll be talking to him too, no doubt.’
‘What’s his name?’ he asked, getting out his pen and notebook for the first time, down to business at last.
‘He is the third son of the Marqués de Palmera. His name is Basilio Tomás Lucena.’
Did he detect pride in that? He wrote it down.
‘How old is he?’
‘Thirty-six, Inspector Jefe,’ she said. ‘You’ve started before I’ve finished.’
‘This is progress.’
‘Did she meet somebody else?’
‘Who?’
‘The public prosecutor.’
‘This isn’t …’
‘Did she?’
‘No.’
‘That’s hard,’ she said. ‘I think that’s harder.’
‘What?’ he asked, instantly annoyed with himself for snatching at her bait.
‘To be dumped because she would rather be alone.’
That slid into him like a white-hot needle. His head came up slowly.
Sra Jiménez looked around the room as if it was her first time in it.
‘Were you aware that your husband was taking Viagra?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Did his doctor know?’
‘I imagine so.’
‘You must have been aware of the risks for a man in his seventies.’
‘He was as strong as a bull.’
‘He’d lost weight.’
‘Doctor’s orders. Cholesterol.’
‘He must have been very disciplined.’
‘I was disciplined for him, Inspector Jefe.’
‘I should have thought as a restaurateur, with all that food around …’
‘I hire and run all the staff in the restaurants,’ she said. ‘They were threatened with the sack if they gave him so much as a crumb.’
‘Did you lose many?’
‘They are Sevillanos, Inspector Jefe, who, as you probably know, rarely take anything seriously. We lost three before they understood.’
‘I’m a Sevillano.’