The Hidden Assassins

25

Seville-Thursday, 8th June 2006, 04.07 hrs

Calderon came to with a start that thumped his head into the wall. His face was pressed against the wooden floor. The smell of polish was strong in his nose. His eyelids snapped open. He was instantly wide awake, as if danger was present and near. He was still dressed as he had been all day. He couldn't understand why he was lying in the corridor of his apartment. Had he been so exhausted that he'd slept where he fell? He checked his watch: just gone four o'clock. He'd only been out for ten minutes or so. He was mystified. He remembered coming into the apartment and the light being on in the kitchen. It was still on, but he was beyond it now, further into the flat, which appeared to be completely dark and cold from the air conditioning. He struggled to his feet, checked himself. He wasn't hurt, hadn't even banged his head. He must have slid down the wall.

'Ines?' he said out loud, puzzled by the kitchen light. Calderon stretched his shoulders back. He was stiff. He stepped into the rhomboid of light on the corridor floor. He saw the blood first, a huge, burgeoning crimson pool on the white marble. The colour of it under the bright white light was truly alarming. He stepped back as if expecting an intruder still to be there. He lowered himself and saw her through the chair and table. He knew immediately that she was dead. Her eyes were wide open, with not a scintilla of light in them.

The blood had spread to the right side of the table and underneath it. It was viscous and seemed to be sucking at the chair and table legs. It was so horribly bright that it throbbed in his vision, as if there was still life in it. Calderon crawled on all fours round to the left of the table to where Ines's feet lay, slack and pointed outwards in front of the sink. Her nightie was rucked up. His eyes travelled from her white legs, over her white cotton panties, beyond the waistband-and that was where the bruising started. He hadn't seen it before. He'd had no idea his fists had accomplished such horrifically visible damage. And it was then that he thought he might have seen this before after all, because his whole body was suddenly consumed with a remembered panic that seemed to constrict his throat and cut off the blood supply to his brain. He reared back on his knees and held his head.

He crawled back out of the kitchen and got to his feet in the corridor. He went swiftly out of the apartment, which required him to unlock the door. He hit the stair light, looked around and went back in. The light was still on in the kitchen. Ines was still lying there. The blood was now one floor tile's width from the wooden floor of the corridor. He pressed the balls of his palms into his eye sockets and ripped them away, but it made no difference to the horror of what lay before him. He dropped to all fours again.

'You fucking bitch, you stupid fucking bitch,' he said. 'Look what the fuck you've gone and done now.'

The noisily bright blood resounded in the hard kitchen. It was also moving, consuming the white marble, reaching towards him. He went back around the table. The ghastly purple of the contusions seemed to have deepened in colour in the interim, or his constant toing and froing in and out of the light was playing tricks. Between her splayed thighs he now saw the welts from his belt lashing. He sank to his knees again, pressed his fists into his eyes and started sobbing. This was it. This was the end. He was finished, finished, finished. Even the most incompetent state judge couldn't fail to make a watertight case against him. A wife-beater who'd gone a step too far. A wife-beater who'd just come back from fucking his mistress, had another confrontation and this time…Oh, yes, it might have been an accident. Was it an accident? It probably was. But this time he'd overdone it and she'd smashed her stupid head open. He pounded the table.

It cleared as suddenly as it had arrived. Calderon sank back on his heels and realized that the terrible panic had gone. His mind was back on track. At least, he felt it was back on track. What he hadn't realized was the nature of the damage done by the panic, the way it had opened up electronic pathways to the flaws in his character. As far as Calderon was concerned, his mind was back to the steel-trap clarity of the leading judge in Seville, and it came to him that, with no chest freezer, the only solution was to get her out of the apartment, and he had to do it now. There was just over an hour before dawn.

Weight was not the problem. Ines was currently 48 kilos. Her height at 1.72m was more of a difficulty. He stormed around the table and into the spare room, where the luggage was kept. He pulled out the biggest suitcase he could find, a huge grey Samsonite with four wheels. He grabbed two white towels from the cupboard.

One of the towels he laid across the kitchen doorway to stop the blood from seeping into the corridor. The other he wrapped around Ines's head. It nearly made him sick. The back of her head was a flat mush and the blood soaked gratefully into the towel, consuming the whiteness with its incarnadine stain. He found a bin liner and pulled it over her head, securing it with cooking string. He washed his hands. He put the case on the table, picked Ines up and laid her in it. She was far too big. Even foetally she didn't fit. He couldn't cram her feet in and, even if he could, her shoulders were too broad for the case to shut. He looked down on her with his considerable intellect surging forward, but fatally, in the wrong direction.

'I'll have to cut her up,' he said to himself. 'Take her feet off and break her collar bones.'

No. That was not going to work. He'd seen films and read novels where they cut up bodies and it never seemed to work, even in fiction where everything can be made to bloody work. He was squeamish, too. Couldn't even watch Extreme Makeover on TV without writhing on the sofa. Think again. He walked around the apartment looking at everyday objects in a completely new light. He stopped in the living room and stared at the carpet, as if willing it not to be the cliche of all cliches.

'You can't wrap her up in the carpet. It'll come straight back to you. Same with the luggage. Think again.'

The river was only three hundred metres from Calle San Vicente. All he had to do was get her in the car, drive fifty metres, turn right on Calle Alfonso XII, go straight up to the traffic lights, cross Calle Nuevo Torneo and there was a road he remembered as quite dark, which ran down to the river and veered left behind the huge bus station of Plaza de Armas. From there it was a matter of metres to the water's edge, but it was a stretch used by early-morning runners, so he would have to act quickly and decisively.

The decorators. The memory of his irritation at them leaving their sheet up the stairs a few days ago juddered into his brain. He ran out of the apartment again, slashed on the stairwell light and stopped himself. He put the apartment door on the latch. That would be too much to bear: locked out of his apartment with his dead wife on the kitchen floor. He leapt down the stairs three at a time and there it all was, under the stairs. There were even full cans of paint to weigh down the body. He pulled out a length of paint-spattered hessian sheeting. He sprinted back up the stairs and laid it out on the clean half of the kitchen floor. He lifted her out of the suitcase, where she'd been lying like a prop in an illusionist's trick, and laid her on the sheet. He folded the edges over. He gasped at the momentary peak of horror at what he was doing. Ines's beautiful face reduced to a scarecrow's stuffed bin liner.

The blood had reached the towel across the doorway and he had to leap over it. He crashed with the deranged heaviness of a toppled wardrobe into the corridor, cracking his head and shoulder a glancing blow on the wall. He shrugged off the pain. He went into his study, tore open the drawers, found the roll of packing tape. He kissed it. On the way back he steadied himself and hopped more carefully over the blood-soaked towel.

He wrapped the tape around her ankles, knees, waist, chest, neck and head. He pocketed the cooking string and tape. He didn't bother to admire his mummified wife, but ran out of the apartment, grabbing his keys and the garage remote as he left. He took the door off the latch. Slapped the fucking light on again-tick, tick, tick, tick, tick-and rumbled down the stairs. He sprinted down Calle San Vicente to the garage, which was just around the corner. He hit the button of the remote as he rounded the bend and the garage door opened, but so slowly he was jumping up and down in towering frustration, swearing and punching at the air. He rolled underneath the quarter-open door and hurtled down the ramp, pressing another button on the remote for the light. He found his car. He hadn't driven the damn thing for weeks. Who needs a car in Seville? Thank fuck I've got a car.

No mistakes. He reversed out calmly, as if suddenly on beta-blockers. He eased up the ramp. The garage door was only just fully open. The car hopped out on to the street, which was deadly quiet. The red digits on the dashboard told him it was 4.37. He pulled up outside the apartment, clicked the button to open the boot. He sprinted upstairs, in the dark this time, fell and cracked his shin such a blow on the top stair that the pain ricocheted up his skeleton to the inside of his skull. He didn't even stop. He unlocked the door, slowed down at the kitchen and stepped over the bloody towel.

Ines. No, not Ines any more. He picked her up. She was absurdly heavy for someone who was less than fifty kilos and had lost at least three kilos of blood. He got her into the corridor, but she was too heavy to cradle-carry her. He hoisted her over his shoulder and closed the apartment door. He stepped carefully down the stairs in the dark again. That fucking tick, tick, tick of the light just too unbearably stressful at this stage. He stuck his head out into the street.

Empty.

Two steps. In the boot. Shut the boot. Close the apartment building door. Wait. Slow down. Think. The tins of paint to weigh down the body. Open the boot. Back under the stairs. Pick up the two cans of paint. As heavy as Ines. Heave them into the boot. Close the boot. In the car. Rear-view mirror. No headlights. Calm. Nice and slow. You're nearly there. This is going to work.

Calderon's car was alone at the traffic lights by the Plaza de Armas, which were showing red. The lights from the dash glowed in his face. He checked the rearview again, saw his eyes. They were pitiful. The lights changed to green. He eased across the six empty lanes and took the ramp down to the river. It was first light. It wasn't quite as dark as he would have liked down by the river. He would have preferred something subterranean, as black as antimatter, as utterly lightless as a collapsed star.

There was still plenty to do. He had to get the body out, attach the cans of paint, and push it into the river. He had a good, long look around until he couldn't believe that everything wasn't moving. He shook the paranoia out of his mind, opened the boot. He lifted the body out and laid it down on the pavement close to the car for cover. He heaved out the cans of paint with superhuman strength. Sweat cascaded. His shirt was stuck to him. His mind closed off. This was the home stretch. Get it done.

He didn't see the man at the back of the bus station, was not aware of him making his fatal call to the police. He worked with savage haste while the man muttered what he was seeing into his mobile phone, along with Calderon's registration number.

With no traffic it took less than a minute for a patrol car to arrive. It had been cruising down by the river less than a kilometre away when the two officers were notified by the communications centre in the Jefatura. The car rolled down the ramp towards the river with its headlights and engine switched off. Only Calderon's car was visible. He was kneeling behind it, taping the second can of paint to Ines's neck. His sweat was dripping on to the hessian sheet. He was finished. All he had to do now was hump close to 100 kilos about a metre across the pavement and then up over a low wall and into the water. He summoned his last reserves of strength. With the two paint cans attached, the body had become incredibly unwieldy. He jammed his hands underneath, not caring about the skin he tore from his fingers and knuckles. He drove forward with his thighs and, with his chest and pelvis close to the floor, he looked like an enormous lizard with some unmanageable prey. Ines's body shifted and thumped into the low wall. He was panting and sobbing. Tears streamed down his face. The pain from his stubbed fingers and torn nails didn't register, but when the headlights of the patrol car finally came on and he found himself encased in light, like an exhibit in the reptile house, he stiffened as if he'd just been shot.

The policemen got out of the patrol car with their weapons drawn. Calderon had yanked his arms out from under the body, rolled over, and was now lying on his back. His stomach convulsed with each racking sob. A lot of the emotion he was coughing up was relief. It was all over. He'd been caught. All that hideous desperation had flowed out of him and now he could relax into infamy and shame.

While one patrolman stood over the sobbing Calderon, the other ran a torch over the taped-up hessian sheet. He put on some latex gloves and squeezed Ines's shoulder just to confirm what he already knew, that this was a body. He went back to the patrol car and radioed the Jefatura.

'This is Alpha-2-0, we're down by the river now, just off the Torneo at the back of the bus station in Plaza de Armas. I can confirm that we have a male in his early forties attempting to dispose of an unidentified body. You'd better get the Inspector Jefe de Homicidios down here.'

'Give me the car registration number.'

'SE 4738 HT.'

'Fuck me.'

'What?'

'That's the same number given to me by the guy who reported the incident. I don't fucking believe this.'

'Who's the owner of the vehicle?'

'Don't you recognize him?'

The patrolman called out to his colleague, who passed a torch over Calderon's face. He was barely recognizable as human, let alone a specific person. His face bore the contortions of a particularly agonized flamenco singer. The patrolman shrugged.

'No idea,' the patrolman said, into the radio.

'How about Juez Esteban Calderon?' said the operator.

'Fuck!' said the patrolman and dropped the mouthpiece.

He shone his own torch in the man's face, grabbed him by the chin to hold him still. Calderon's agony slackened off with surprise. The patrolman let a sly grin spread across his face before he went back to the car. Falcon had to claw his way out of sleep like an abandoned potholer, desperately trying to reach a star of light in a firmament of blackness. He came to with a jerk and grunt of disgust, as if he'd been spewed up by his own bed. The bedside light hurt him. The green digits on his clock told him it was 5.03. He grappled with the phone and sank back into his pillow with it clasped to his ear.

The voice was of the duty officer in the communications centre of the Jefatura. He was babbling. He was speaking so fast and with such a heavy Andaluz accent that Falcon only picked up the first syllable of every other word. He stopped him, got him to start again from the top.

'We have a situation down by the bus station at the Plaza de Armas. Behind the bus station, down by the river near the Puente de Chapina, a man has been apprehended attempting to dispose of a body. We have a positive identification of the owner of the vehicle used to bring the body to that point, and we have a positive ID of the man who was attempting to dispose of the body. And the man's name, Inspector Jefe, is…Esteban Calderon.'

Falcon's leg spasmed as if some high voltage had shot up it. In one movement he was out of bed and pacing the floor.

'Esteban Calderon, the judge? Are you positive?'

'We are now. The patrolman at the scene has checked the ID and read the number back to me. That and the car's registration confirm the man as Esteban Calderon.'

'Have you spoken to anyone about this?'

'Not yet, Inspector Jefe.'

'Have you called the Juez de Guardia?'

'No, you're the first person. I should have-'

'How was the incident reported?'

'An anonymous phone call from a guy who said he was walking his dog down by the river.'

'What time?'

'It was timed at 4.52 a.m.'

'Is that when people walk their dogs?'

'Old people who can't sleep do, especially in this heat.'

'How did he report it?'

'He called in on his mobile, told me what he was seeing, gave me the registration number and hung up.'

'Name and address?'

'Didn't have time to ask him.'

'Don't talk to anyone about this,' said Falcon. 'Call the patrolmen and tell them there is to be radio silence on this matter until I've spoken to Comisario Elvira.'

The bedroom seemed to fill up with the catastrophe of scandal. Falcon went out on to the gallery overlooking the patio. The morning was warm. He felt sick. He called Elvira, gave him some seconds to wake up and then told him the news in the most measured tone he could muster. Falcon broke the ensuing silence himself, by telling Elvira how many people, at this point, knew what had taken place.

'We have to get him, the body and the car off the street as soon as possible, whatever happens,' said Elvira. 'And we need a judge and a Medico Forense to do that.'

'Juez Romero is reliable and neither a friend, nor enemy, of Esteban Calderon.'

'This mustn't look like a cover-up,' said Elvira, almost to himself.

'This isn't something that can be covered up,' said Falcon.

'We have to do things absolutely by the book. The investigation might have to be taken off your hands, given Esteban Calderon's status.'

'I think it better for me to initiate the proceedings,' said Falcon.

'Let's go for normal procedure, but nobody, absolutely nobody, is to talk about this. We must have no leaks until we can get a press statement together. I'll speak to Comisario Lobo. Tell the communications officer to make the usual calls but not, under any circumstances, to inform the press. If it gets out before we're ready there'll be hell to pay.'

'The only person we can't control is the anonymous caller who reported the incident,' said Falcon.

'Well, he shouldn't know who it was he was reporting, should he?' said Elvira.

This was too big a scandal to contain. Elvira was asking too much. This was going to come sweating out of the Jefatura walls. Falcon called the communications centre, gave the instructions and asked the officer to call Felipe and Jorge to the crime scene. He showered, standing under the drilling water, trying to think of any plausible, innocent explanation for Calderon being discovered down by the river with a dead body.

It was 5.30 and the dawn was well advanced by the time he walked across the Plaza de Armas to the incident. The traffic on the Torneo was still very light. A patrol car had parked at the top of the ramp and some cones had been put out to stop any traffic from turning down the road. The duty judge was already at the scene, as was a police photographer, who was taking some shots. Jorge and Felipe arrived and were allowed down the ramp.

There was no sign of Calderon. Two patrolmen were making sure no early-morning joggers came past the scene along the riverbank. The duty judge told Falcon that Calderon was sitting in the back of the patrol car with one of the policemen who'd first come across the incident.

'We're just waiting for a Medico Forense to arrive and inspect the body.'

A set of tyres squeaked at the top of the ramp and a car rolled down and parked up. The Medico Forense got out with his bag. He was already dressed in a white hooded boiler suit and had a mask hanging from his neck. He shook hands, put on gloves, and they proceeded to the body. An ambulance arrived with no siren or flashing lights.

The Medico Forense used a scalpel to cut the tape wrapped around the body. He worked from the feet up to the head. He laid open the hessian sheet. The head wrapped in the black bin liner looked sinister, as if the body had been the subject of some sexual deviancy. Falcon started to feel dizzy. The Medico Forense murmured into his dictaphone about the heavy bruising on the torso. He put his scalpel through the cooking string at the neck of the body and eased away the bin liner. A darkening at the edges of his vision made Falcon clutch at the duty judge's sleeve.

'Are you all right, Inspector Jefe?' he asked.

Under the bin liner the head was wrapped in a towel. The front was white, with blood smears over it. The Medico Forense lifted up one corner of the towel and folded it back. The outline of the face was visible, as under a shroud. He pulled away the other corner of the towel and Falcon dropped unconscious to the floor, with the features of his ex-wife imprinted on his retina. Falcon came to on the ground. The duty judge had managed to catch him and break his fall. The paramedics from the ambulance were over him. He heard the duty judge above their heads.

'He's in shock. This is his ex-wife. He shouldn't really be here.'

The paramedics helped him up. The Medico Forense continued to murmur into his dictaphone. He checked the thermometer, made a calculation and muttered the time of death.

Tears welled up as Falcon looked down once more on Ines's inert body. This was a scene from her life that he'd never imagined-her death. Over the years he'd done a lot of thinking and talking about Ines. He'd relived their life together ten times over, until he'd nearly driven Alicia Aguado insane. He'd only been able to get rid of her permanent occupation of his mind by finally seeing her for what she was, and realizing how badly she'd behaved and treated him. But this was not how it should have ended. No amount of selfishness deserved this.

The paramedics moved him away from the body and got him sitting on the low wall by the river, away from where the Medico Forense was working. Falcon breathed deeply. The duty judge came over.

'You can't handle this case,' he said.

'I'll call Comisario Elvira,' said Falcon, nodding. 'He'll appoint somebody from the outside. My entire squad is an interested party.'

Elvira was speechless until he finally managed to come up with his condolences. The catastrophe was so much worse than he'd imagined and, as he spoke, first to Falcon and then the duty judge, the hideousness of the morning press conference began to spread like a malignancy through his innards.

The duty judge finished the call and handed the mobile back to Falcon. They shook hands. Falcon took one last look at the body. Her face was perfect and undamaged. He shook his head in disbelief and had an image from years ago, when he'd come across Ines in the street. She'd been laughing; laughing so hard that she was doubled up with her hair flung forward, staggering backwards on her high heels.

He turned away and left the scene. He walked past the patrol car where Calderon was being held. The door was open. The radio squawked. Calderon's wrists were cuffed, his torn and bleeding hands lay in his lap. He stared straight ahead and his vision did not deviate even when Falcon leaned in.

'Esteban,' said Falcon.

Calderon turned to him, and said the sentence that Falcon had heard more times from the mouths of murderers than any other.

'I didn't do it.'