The Blind Man of Seville

10

Friday, 13th April 2001, the AVE Madrid-Seville

Even this AVE, the late one, which wouldn’t get into Seville until after midnight, was full. As the train shot through the Castillian night, Falcón brushed the crumbs of a bocadillo de chorizo from his lap and stared out of the window through the transparent reflection of the passenger opposite him. Thoughts trickled through his mind, which was tired but still racing from the intrusions he’d made into the Jiménez family.

He’d left José Manuel Jiménez at 3 p.m., having asked if he’d mind him visiting Marta at the San Juan de Dios mental institution in Ciempozuelos, forty kilometres south of the city. The lawyer warned him that it wasn’t likely to be a productive meeting but agreed to phone ahead so that he’d be expected. Jiménez had been right, but not for the reasons he’d thought. Marta had had a fall.

Falcón came across her in the surgery having a couple of stitches put in her eyebrow. She was ashen, which he supposed could have been her normal colouring. Her hair was black and white, wound up and pinned in a bun. Her eyes were set deep in her head and their surrounds were charcoal grey with large purple quarter-circles that reached the top of her cheekbones. It could have been bruising from the fall, but had a more permanent look to it.

A Moroccan male nurse was sitting with her, holding her hand and murmuring in a mixture of Spanish and Arabic, while a female junior doctor stitched the eyebrow which had bled profusely, spattering the hospital-issue clothing. Throughout the operation she held on to something attached to a gold chain round her neck. Falcón assumed it was a cross, but on the one occasion that she released it he saw there was a gold locket and a small key.

She was in a wheelchair. He accompanied the nurse as he pushed her back to the ward, which contained five other women. Four were silent while the fifth maintained a constant murmur of what sounded like prayer but was in fact a stream of obscenities. The Moroccan parked Marta and went to the woman, held her hand, rubbed her back. She quietened.

‘She always becomes agitated at the sight of blood,’ he explained.

The Moroccan’s name was Ahmed. He had a degree in psychology from Casablanca University. His good nature and openness iced over visibly when Falcón showed him his police ID.

‘But what are you doing here?’ asked Ahmed. ‘These people don’t go out. They’re permanent residents, barely capable of the simplest of things. Beyond the gates is as good as another planet to them.’

Falcón looked down on Marta’s salt-and-pepper head, the white pad over her eyebrow, and an immense sadness broke inside his chest. Here was the real casualty of the Jiménez story.

‘Does she understand anything of what we say?’ he asked.

‘It depends,’ he said. ‘If you talked about C-A-T-S, she might react.’

‘What about A-R-T-U-R-O?’

Ahmed’s face settled into a bland wariness, which Falcón had seen before in immigrants under police questioning. The blandness was to minimize any irritation in the officer, the wariness to combat intrusive questioning. It was an attitude that might have worked with Moroccan police, but it annoyed Falcón.

‘Her father has been murdered,’ he said quietly.

Marta coughed once, twice and the third was followed by a stream of vomit, which pooled in her lap and dripped to the floor.

‘She’s in shock from her fall,’ said Ahmed, and moved away.

Falcón sat on the bed, his face level with Marta’s. Vomit clung to some hairs on her chin. She was panting and not looking at him. Her hand still held the locket. Ahmed returned with new clothes and cleaning equipment on a trolley. He screened Marta off. Falcón sat across the room to wait. Under her bed was a small, padlocked metal trunk.

The screens were pulled back and Marta reappeared in new clothes. Falcón walked with Ahmed as he pushed his trolley.

‘Have you ever talked to her about Arturo?’

‘It’s not my job. I’m qualified, but only in my own country. Here I am a nurse. Only the doctor talks to her about Arturo.’

‘Have you been present?’

‘I have not been in attendance, but I have been there.’

‘What’s her reaction to the name?’

Ahmed performed his cleaning tasks on automatic.

‘She becomes very upset. She brings her fingers to her mouth and makes a noise, a kind of desperate pleading noise.’

‘Does she articulate anything?’

‘She is not articulate.’

‘But you spend more time with her, maybe you understand her better than the doctor.’

‘She says: “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my fault.”’

‘Do you know who Arturo is?’

‘I haven’t seen her case notes and nobody has seen fit to inform me.’

‘Who is her doctor?’

‘Dra Azucena Cuevas. She is on holiday until next week.’

‘What about the kitten? Wasn’t it you who brought in the kitten and she started …?’

‘There are no cats allowed on the ward.’

‘The locket round her neck, and the key — is that the key to the trunk under her bed? Do you know what she keeps in there?’

‘These people don’t have very much, Inspector Jefe. If I see something private, I leave it for them. It’s all they have apart from … life. And it’s amazing how long you survive if that is all you have.’

That was Ahmed. A perfectly intelligent, reasonable and caring individual, but not an expansive one, not in front of authority. He had irritated Falcón. He tried to picture him as the blackness ripped past the window of the AVE, just as he had done José Manuel Jiménez, whose tormented features were pin-sharp in his mind. He failed because Ahmed had done what all immigrants seek to do. He’d blended in. He didn’t stand out. He’d merged with his drab, grey surroundings and disappeared into modern Spanish society.

The trickle of these thoughts stopped as he found that the transparent reflection of the woman opposite was returning his look. He enjoyed this: to stare at his leisure as if he was doing nothing more than admiring the hurtling night. The flickering of sex started up in him. He had been celibate since Inés had left. Their sex had been nearly riotous in the early days. It made him pull at his collar to even think of it. Eating outside on the patio and Inés suddenly coming round to his side of the table and straddling him, tugging at his trousers, pushing his hands up her dress. Where had all that gone? How had marriage snuffed that out so quickly? By the end she wouldn’t let him look at her dressing. ‘You have no heart, Javier Falcón.’ What was she talking about? Did he watch blue movies? Did he fuck prostitutes while watching blue movies? Would he stamp out the existence of his own child? And yet … Raúl Jiménez still had, yes, the comfort of a beautiful woman. Consuelo, his consolation.

The woman opposite was no longer meeting his eye in the glass. He turned to her real face. There was a small horror there, a minor pity as if she’d perceived the complications of a mid-forties man and wanted none of it. She dived into her handbag, would have liked it to swallow her whole, but it was a little Balenciaga number with room for a lipstick, two condoms and some folding money. He turned back to the glass. A small light hovered in the blackness, remote, with no other in sight.

He slumped back exhausted from the endless cycles of thought, not of his investigation but of his failed marriage. That always induced some internal collapse as soon as he came up against the wall of Inés’s words: ‘No tienes corazón, Javier Falcón.’ It even rhymed.

It was the new chemistry in his brain, he decided later, that had given him his first new thought about Inés, or rather a realization about an old thought. He wasn’t going to be able to move on, he wasn’t going to be able to flirt with a woman in a railway carriage until he’d proved to himself that Inés’s words were wrong, that they did not apply. It hit him harder than he’d expected. There was even a jolt of adrenalin, which should have meant fear, except that all he was doing was sitting in the AVE roaming around his own head, which contained the uncomfortable notion that she might be right.

He drifted into sleep, a man in a silver bullet train speeding through the dark to an unknown destination. He had the dream again of being the fish; of flashing through the water with fear driving his tail as the visceral tug slowly tore through him. He came awake thumping his head into the seat. The carriage was empty, the train in the station, crowds of passengers pouring past his window.

He went home and watched a movie without taking anything in. He turned off the television and collapsed unfed and unsettled into his bed. He dipped in and out of sleep, not wanting to have the dream again but not wanting to be awake with an anxious world outside his walls. Four o’clock brought him round into a permanent dark wakefulness and he worried about the new chemicals in his brain, which might alter the balance of his mind, while the wooden beams in his vast house groaned like other less fortunate inmates in a distant part of the asylum.

Saturday, 14th April 2001

He got up at 6 a.m. unrested, his nerves jangling like keys on a gaoler’s ring so that he actually started thinking about keys in the house and where they were, the ones that would open his father’s studio. He went to the desk in the study and found a whole drawer full of keys. How could there be so many doors? He took the drawer up to the wrought-iron gate that locked off the part of the gallery in front of his father’s studio. He tried them all, but none of them worked and he walked off, leaving the drawer there on the floor, the keys spread out.

He showered, dressed, went out, bought a newspaper, the ABC, and drank a café solo. He checked the death notices. Raúl Jiménez was being buried today at eleven o’clock in the Cementerio de San Fernando. He drove to the office, checked the voice mail on his mobile, which was all from Ramírez.

There was a full turnout of all six officers from the Grupo de Homicidios, which was not usual for a Saturday before Easter. He briefed them on the outcome of the discussion with Calderón and put Pérez and Fernández into the Feria ground opposite the Edificio Presidente, Baena in the streets around the apartment block, and Serrano on working up a list of laboratories and medical suppliers who might have had an unusual sale of chloroform or missing instruments. The four men left. Ramírez stayed, arms folded, leaning against the window.

‘Any further thoughts, Inspector Jefe?’ he asked.

‘Did we get a statement from Marciano Ruíz?’

Ramírez nodded at the desk, said there was nothing new in it. Falcón read it through only to avoid having to tell Ramírez about his trip to Madrid and the Jiménez family horrors. It had to have more relevance to the murder or Ramírez would start undermining him, and he’d find other officers looking at him sadly as the guy who’d started a murder inquiry by going back to an incident of thirty-six years ago.

‘I went to see Eloisa Gómez yesterday afternoon,’ said Ramírez.

‘Did you get anything out of her?’

‘She didn’t offer me a free blow job, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Not after what you did to her yesterday,’ said Falcón. ‘Did she crack?’

‘She’s not going to talk to me even if she did do it, and now she’s scared.’

‘You were getting on so well,’ said Falcón. ‘I thought you were going to ask her home.’

‘Maybe I should have been more patient,’ said Ramírez. ‘But, you know, I really thought she’d let him in and a hard verbal shock might do the trick.’

‘We’ll start the day with Mudanzas Triana,’ said Falcón, moving along. ‘Then we’ll go to the Jiménez funeral with a video camera and film the mourners. We’ll check those mourners off against the address list and follow up with interviews. We’ll build a picture of his life.’

What about Eloisa Gómez?’

‘Pérez can pull her in again this afternoon. That’ll be nearly forty-eight hours since she was with Raúl Jiménez. If she was an accomplice, the killer will have made contact by then and that might have changed her mental landscape.’

‘Or her entire landscape,’ said Ramírez. ‘For the worse.’

Ramírez picked up the video camera and drove them to Mudanzas Triana, who were on the Avenida Santa Cecilia. They spoke to the boss, Ignacio Bravo, who listened to their theoretical scenario with unmoving eyes behind puffy lids while smoking one Ducados lit from another.

‘First of all, it’s impossible,’ he said. ‘My workers are —’

‘They signed a statement,’ said Ramírez, dead bored, handing it over.

Bravo read the document, flicking ash in the vague direction of a miniature tyre that enclosed an ashtray.

‘They will be fired,’ he said.

‘Talk us through your arrangement with Sr and Sra Jiménez,’ said Falcón. ‘You can start with why they wanted to move during Semana Santa, which must be the busiest time of year for a restaurant.’

‘And not cheap for removals. Our rates double. I explained it all to her, Inspector Jefe. But we couldn’t do it the next week when her restaurants were closed because. we’re all booked up … as is everybody else. So she paid her money. She didn’t care.’

‘When did you first take a look at the job?’

‘I went there last week to see the layout, the quantity of large furniture, the number of packing cases needed, all that stuff. I called her the next day to tell her it would be a two-day job and gave her a quote.’

‘A two-day job?’ said Ramírez. ‘So when did you start?’

‘Tuesday.’

‘Which would make it a three-day job.’

‘Sr Jiménez called to say he didn’t want his study moved until Thursday. I told him it would cost even more than double and that we could do the job in the time. He insisted. I don’t argue the point with rich people; I just make sure they pay. They’re the worst …’

He trailed off when he saw the look from the policemen.

‘How many people knew about the change from the original arrangement?’ asked Falcón.

‘I see what you’re getting at,’ he said, unable to get comfortable. ‘Of course, everybody had to know. It involved changing all the jobs around. You don’t think that one of my men is the murderer?’

‘What’s intriguing us,’ said Falcón, leaving Bravo’s suspicion to hang in the air, ‘is that, if our scenario is correct, the murderer must have known about the change in the arrangement. He must have known that Sr Jiménez was going to stay an extra night and be on his own. He could only know that from Sr Jiménez himself or from here. When did you confirm the job with Sra Jiménez?’

‘Wednesday, 4th April,’ he said, flicking through his diary.

‘When did Sr Jiménez make the change?’

‘Friday, 6th April.’

‘Had you already assigned a work team for the job?’

‘I did that on the Wednesday.’

‘How do you do that?’

‘I call my secretary, who informs the depot foreman, who writes it up on a whiteboard downstairs.’

Falcón asked to speak to the secretary. Bravo called her in: a small, dark nervous woman in her fifties. They asked what she’d said to the foreman.

‘I told him that there’d been a change, that Sr Jiménez didn’t want the study to be touched until Thursday morning and that a small bed should be left in the kids’ room.’

‘What did the foreman say?’

‘The foreman made a coarse remark about what the bed would be used for.’

‘What does he do with that information?’

‘He puts it up on the whiteboard in red to show that it’s a change,’ she said. ‘And he posts the comments about the study and bed in a separate column.’

‘He also types it on to their worksheets,’ said Bravo, ‘so there’s two ways they can’t forget. They’re not very gifted people in the removals business.’

The three men went down into the depot and looked at the whiteboard, which contained all the information for all jobs in April and May but with the Jiménez job still open. The foreman came out. The secretary was right, he looked the sort who kickstarted the day with a couple of brandies.

‘So everybody in this depot would know of the change to the Jiménez job?’ said Falcón.

‘Without a doubt,’ said the foreman.

‘What’s the security like here?’ asked Ramírez.

‘We don’t store anything here, so it’s minimal,’ said Bravo. ‘One man, one dog.’

‘During the day?’

Bravo shook his head.

‘No cameras either?’

‘It’s not necessary.’

‘So you can just walk in off the street through the back there from Calle Maestro Arrieta?’

‘If you wanted to.’

‘Any overalls gone missing?’ asked Ramírez.

Nothing had gone missing, nothing had been reported. The overalls were all standard issue with MUDANZAS TRIANA stencilled on the back. It wasn’t a difficult thing to copy.

‘Anybody been in here who shouldn’t?’ asked Ramírez.

‘Just people looking for work.’

‘People?’

‘Two or three guys a week come in here and I tell them the same thing. We don’t recruit people off the street.’

‘What about the last two weeks?’

‘A few more than usual trying to get some money together for Easter and the Feria.’

‘Twenty?’

‘More like ten.’

‘What did they look like?’

‘Well, fortunately they were all short and fat, otherwise I’d have a job recalling them all for you.’

‘Look, funny guy,’ said Ramírez, getting his finger out, ‘somebody came in here, picked up some information about the job you were doing in the Edificio Presidente and used it to get himself into an apartment there and torture an old man to death. So try a little harder for us.’

‘You didn’t say he was tortured to death,’ said Bravo.

‘I still don’t remember,’ said the foreman.

‘Maybe they were immigrants,’ said Ramírez.

‘Some of them might have been.’

‘Moroccans, maybe, who work for no money.’

‘We don’t employ —’ started Bravo.

‘We heard you the first time,’ said Ramírez. ‘I didn’t believe you then. So, look, if you want a quiet life with no visits from Immigration, then start thinking, start remembering who’s been in here since last Friday and if you saw anyone taking a particular interest in that whiteboard.’

‘Because,’ said Falcón, nodding at the foreman, ‘you’re the only person we’ve met who’s probably seen this killer, talked to him.’

‘And you know … that’s something the killer might start thinking, too,’ said Ramírez. ‘Buenos días.’