The Ignorance of Blood Read online

  ‘What is left is not a pretty sight,’ said the Guardia Civil.

  ‘I'll take a look,’ said the médico forense, ‘then you can start cutting him out of there.’

  Felipe and Jorge completed their initial inspection of the scene and took their photographs. They joined Falcón while the médico forense finished his work.

  ‘What the fuck are we doing here?’ asked Felipe, yawning wider than a dog. ‘It's not murder.’

  ‘He's Russian mafia and there's a lot of money here,’ said Falcón. ‘Any evidence we gather might be usable in a future conviction. Fingerprints on the money and suitcase, mobile phone, address book; there might be a laptop in there…’

  ‘There's a briefcase on the back seat, which wasn't touched by the steel rods,’ said the Guardia Civil. ‘And there's a cool box in the boot. We haven't opened either of them.’

  ‘This is why we need an Organized Crime Response Squad in Seville,’ said Jorge.

  ‘We're running this for the moment. They're sending someone up from the Costa del Sol GRECO and an intelligence guy from CICO,’ said Falcón. ‘Let's take a look at this money. Elvira called me on the way to say he's got Prosegur to send a van out.’

  The Guardia Civil opened the boot. There was suddenly a crowd.

  ‘Joder,’ said one of the motorbike cops.

  The visible money was in used notes and bound in packs of €100- and €50-denomination notes. Some of the packs had burst open on impact from the steel rod, but there was no loose money outside the vehicle.

  ‘Let's have some room around here,’ said Falcón. ‘Glove up. Only the forensics and I will touch this money. Jorge, bring a couple of bin liners over, one for each denomination.’

  They counted out the packs of money, avid eyes looking on. At the bottom of the suitcase were several layers of €200-denomination notes and below them two layers of €500 notes. Jorge went to get two more bin liners. Falcón made his calculations.

  ‘Not counting this loose money, we're looking at seven million, six hundred and fifty thousand euros.’

  ‘That's got to be drug money,’ said the Guardia Civil.

  ‘More likely people-trafficking and prostitution,’ said Falcón, who was calling Comisario Elvira.

  As he gave his report the Prosegur van pulled up in front of the last Nissan 4×4. Two helmeted guys lifted a metal trunk out of the back. Falcón hung up. Felipe had taped up the packs of money into tight black blocks and was marking up the bin liners with white stick-on labels. They put the four blocks into the trunk, which was locked with two keys, one given to Falcón, who signed for it.

  The money moved off. The scene relaxed.

  Falcón lifted out the cool box, opened it. Krug champagne and melting blocks of ice around bottles of Stolichnaya.

  ‘I suppose eight million euros would merit a bit of a celebration,’ said the Guardia Civil. ‘We could have all retired on that lot.’

  While one of the fire brigade teams winched the steel rods out of the car, the other reached through the window, cut away the air bag and started on the door frames with an oxyacetylene torch. Vasili Lukyanov's body was taken out in pieces and laid on an opened body bag on a stretcher. His arms, shoulders and head were intact, as were his legs, hips and lower torso. The rest had vaporized. His face was deeply furrowed with red streaks where the windscreen glass had shredded the skin. His left eye had exploded, part of his scalp was missing and his right ear was a mangled flap of gristle. He grinned horribly with lips partially torn away and some teeth ripped from their gums. His lap was stained dark with his blood. His shoes were brand new, the soles hardly scuffed.

  A young fireman vomited into the oleanders by the side of the road. The paramedics tucked Lukyanov into the body bag and zipped it up.

  ‘Poor fucker,’ said Felipe, bagging the suitcase. ‘Eight million in the boot and you get speared by a flying steel rod.’

  ‘You're more likely to win the lottery,’ said Jorge, taking a look at the briefcase's combination lock, trying to open it, unsuccessfully, and then bagging it. ‘Should have bought a ticket and stayed at home.’

  ‘Here we go,’ said Felipe, who'd just opened the glove compartment. ‘One nine-millimetre Glock and a spare clip for our friendly Russian comrade.’

  He sorted through the car papers and insurance documents, while Jorge worked through a selection of motorway receipts.

  ‘Something to brighten up his day,’ said Jorge, shaking a plastic sachet of white powder which had fallen out of the receipts.

  ‘And something to dull someone else's day,’ said Felipe, pulling out a cosh from under the seat. ‘There's blood and hair still stuck to it.’

  ‘He's got GPS.’

  ‘Anyone got the keys?’ asked Felipe, over his shoulder.

  The Guardia Civil handed him the keys, they turned on the electrics. Felipe played with the GPS.

  ‘He was coming from Estepona, heading for Calle Garlopa in Seville Este.’

  ‘That narrows it down to a few thousand apartments,’ said Falcón.

  ‘At least it didn't say Town Hall, Plaza Nueva, Seville,’ said Jorge.

  Everybody laughed and went quiet, as if it might not be so far from the truth.

  Another hour and they'd been through the rest of the car. They crossed over the motorway with the evidence bags, loaded them into the back of their van and drove off. Falcón oversaw the loading of the Range Rover on to the breakdown truck.

  First light creaked open at the hinge of the world as he walked back up to where the truck had hit the barrier, whose galvanized metal ballooned. The truck had been pulled away and was now on the hard shoulder, front jacked up behind the tow truck. He called Elvira to tell him that the Prosegur van had left and to make sure someone was at the Jefatura to receive the money. The forensics still needed to go over it before it could be sent to the bank.

  ‘What else?’ asked Elvira.

  ‘A locked briefcase, a handgun, a bloody cosh, Krug champagne, vodka and a few grams of coke,’ said Falcón. ‘A violent party animal was Vasili Lukyanov.’

  ‘Animal is the word,’ said Elvira. ‘He was arrested back in June on suspicion of rape of a sixteen-year-old girl from Málaga.’

  ‘And he got off?’

  ‘The charges were dropped on him and another brute called Nikita Sokolov and, having seen the photos of the girl, it's nothing short of a miracle,’ said Elvira. ‘But then I called Málaga and it seems that the girl and her parents have moved into a brand-new, four-bedroomed house in a development outside Nerja and her father has just opened a restaurant in the town … which is where his daughter now works. This new world makes me feel old, Javier.’

  ‘There are a lot of well-fed people out there who are still hungry,’ said Falcón. ‘You should have seen the reaction to all that money in the back of the Russian's car.’

  ‘You got it all, though, didn't you?’

  ‘Who knows if a few packs were lifted before I arrived?’

  ‘I'll call you when Vicente Cortés gets here and we'll have a meeting in my office,’ said Elvira. ‘Maybe you should go home and get some sleep.’

  They came for Alexei just before dawn and couldn't raise him. One of them had to scramble down the side of the small villa and get into the garden over a low wall. He broke the lock on the sliding window, let himself in and opened the front door for his friend, who took out his Stechkin APS handgun, which he'd hung on to since leaving the KGB back in the early 1990s.

  They went upstairs. He was in the bedroom, wound up in a sheet on the floor with an empty bottle of whisky next to him, dead to the world. They kicked him awake. He came to, moaning.

  They stuck him in the shower and turned on the water, cold. Alexei grunted as if they were still kicking him. The muscles trembled under his tattoos. They kept the water trained on him for a couple of minutes and let him out. He shaved with the two men in the mirror and took some aspirin, swilled down with tap water. They walked him into the bedroom and watched h
im while he got dressed in his Sunday best. The ex-KGB man sat on the bed with his Stechkin APS dangling between his knees.

  They went downstairs and out into the heat. The sun was just up, the sea was blue, there was barely any movement, just birds. They got into the car and drove down the hill.

  Ten minutes later they were in the club, sitting in Vasili Lukyanov's office, but with Leonid Revnik behind the desk smoking an H. Upmann Coronas Junior cigar. He had short grey hair, cut en brosse with a sharp widow's peak, big shoulders and chest under a very expensive white shirt from Jermyn Street.

  ‘Did you speak to him last night?’ asked Revnik.

  ‘To Vasili? Yes, I got through eventually,’ said Alexei.

  ‘Where was he?’

  ‘On the road to Seville. I don't know where.’

  ‘What did he have to say?’ asked Revnik.

  ‘That Yuri Donstov had made him an offer that you wouldn't have given him in a million years.’

  ‘He's right there,’ said Revnik. ‘What else?’

  Alexei shrugged. Revnik glanced up. A hard fist clubbed Alexei in the side of the head, knocked him and the chair over.

  ‘What else?’ said Revnik.

  They hefted Alexei and the chair back to vertical. A lump was already up on the side of his face.

  ‘“What the fuck,”’ said Alexei. ‘He had an accident.’

  That had Revnik's attention.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘We were talking and he suddenly said: “What the fuck is this …” then BANG! and the sound of tyres screeching, a thump, a crash and then it all went dead.’

  Revnik hit the desk.

  ‘Why the fuck didn't you tell us that last night?’

  ‘I was drunk. I passed out.’

  ‘You know what that means?’ said Revnik to no one in particular, but pointing across the room. ‘It means that what was in there is now in the hands of the police.’

  They looked at the empty safe.

  ‘Take him away,’ said Revnik.

  They took him back out to the car, drove up into the hills. The smell of pine was very strong after the cool of the night. They walked him into the trees and the ex-KGB man finally got to use his Stechkin APS.

  2

  Outside Seville – Friday, 15th September 2006, 08.30 hrs

  The sun had been up for twenty-five minutes over the flat fields of the fertile flood plain of the Guadalquivir river. It was close to 30°C when Falcón drove back into the city at 8.30 a.m. At home he lay on his bed fully clothed in the air-con and tried to get some sleep. It was hopeless. He drank another coffee before heading into the office.

  The short drive took him down by the river, past the spearhead railings and gates to the Maestranza bullring, whose whitewashed façade, smooth and brilliant as the icing of a cake, had its porthole windows and dark red doors and shutters piped with ochre. The high phoenix palms near the Toro de Oro sagged against the already bleached sky and as he crossed the San Telmo bridge the slow water was almost green and had no autumnal sparkle.

  The emptiness of the Plaza de Cuba and the shopping streets leading off it was a reminder that it was still a summer heat beating down on the bludgeoned city. Sevillanos had returned from their August holidays to find their new vitality sapped by suffocating apartments, drained by power cuts and the old city centre crammed with hot, unbreathable air. The end-of-summer storms, which scrubbed the cobbles clean, hosed down the grateful trees, rinsed the uninspired atmosphere and brought colour back to the faded sky, had not arrived. With no respite since May, ladies' fans no longer opened with the customary snap and their wrists trembled with a fluttering palsy at the thought of another month of endless palpitations.

  Nobody in the office at 10.15 a.m. The paperwork from the 6th June Seville bombing still stacked knee-high around his desk. The court case against the two remaining suspects was going to take months, possibly years, to construct and there was no guarantee of success. The wall chart pinned up opposite Falcón's desk with all its names and links said it all – there was a gap in what the media were calling the Catholic Conspiracy, or rather, not so much a gap as a dead end.

  Every time he sat at his desk the same five facts presented themselves to him:

  1) Although the two suspects they had in custody had been successfully linked to the two ringleaders of the plot – all four were right-wing and staunch Catholics, hence the name of the conspiracy – neither of them had any idea who'd planted the bomb, which on 6th June had destroyed an apartment building and a nearby pre-school in a residential area of Seville.

  2) The ringleaders themselves, Lucrecio Arenas and César Benito, had been murdered before they could be arrested. The former had been shot just as he was about to dive into his swimming pool in Marbella and the latter had had his throat so brutally chopped with the blade of a hand that he'd choked to death in his hotel room in Madrid.

  3) Over the last three months a plethora of agencies, at the behest of the board of directors, had gone through the offices of the Banco Omni in Madrid, where Lucrecio Arenas had been the Chief Executive Officer. They'd interviewed all his old colleagues and business contacts, searched his properties and grilled his family, but had found nothing.

  4) They'd also gone through the Horizonte Group's building in Barcelona where César Benito had been an architect and board director of the construction division. They'd searched his apartments, houses in the Costa del Sol and studio, and interviewed everybody he'd ever known and likewise found nothing.

  5) They had tried to gain access to the I4IT (Europe) building in Madrid. This company was the European arm of an American-based investment group run by two born-again Christians from Cleveland, Ohio. They were the ultimate owners of Horizonte and, through a team of highly paid lawyers, had successfully blocked all investigations, arguing that the police had no right to enter their offices.

  Every time Falcón threw himself into his chair he faced that chart and the hard brick wall behind it.

  The world had moved on, as it always did, even after New York, Madrid and London, but Falcón had to mark time, wandering aimlessly in the maze of passages that the conspiracy had become. As always, he was haunted by the promise he'd made to the people of Seville in a live broadcast on 10th June: that he would find the perpetrators of the Seville bombing, even if it took him the rest of his career. That was what he faced, although he would never admit it to Comisario Elvira, when he woke up alone in the dark. He had penetrated the conspiracy, gained access to the dark castle, but it had rewarded him with nothing. Now he was reduced to hoping for ‘the secret door’ or ‘the hidden passage’ which would take him to what he could not see.

  What he had noticed was that the one person, over these three long months, who was never far from his thoughts was the disgraced judge, Esteban Calderón, and, by association, the judge's girlfriend, a Cuban wood sculptor called Marisa Moreno.

  ‘Inspector Jefe?’

  Falcón looked up from the dark pit of his mind to find the wide-open face of one of his best young detectives, the ex-nun, Cristina Ferrera. There was nothing very particular about Cristina that made her attractive – the small nose, the big smile, the short, straight, dull blonde hair didn't do it. But what she had on the inside – a big heart, unshakeable moral beliefs and an extraordinary empathy – had a way of appearing on the outside. And it was that which Falcón had found so appealing during their first interview for the job she now held.

  ‘I thought you were in here,’ she said, ‘but you didn't answer. Up early?’

  ‘A colourful Russian got killed by a flying steel rod on the motorway,’ said Falcón. ‘Have you got anything for me?’

  ‘Two weeks ago you asked me to look into the life of Juez Calderón's girlfriend, Marisa Moreno, to see if there was any dirt attached,’ said Ferrera.

  ‘And here I am, by remarkable coincidence, thinking about that very person,’ said Falcón. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Don't get too excited.’

 
‘I can tell from your face,’ said Falcón, drifting back to the wall chart, ‘that whatever it is, it's not much to show for two weeks' work.’

  ‘Not solid work, and you know what it's like here in Seville: things take time,’ said Ferrera. ‘You already know she has no criminal record.’

  ‘So what did you find?’ asked Falcón, catching a different tone in her voice.

  ‘After getting people to do a lot of rooting around in the local police archives, I've come up with a reference.’

  ‘A reference?’

  ‘She reported a missing person. Her sister, Margarita, back in May 1998.’

  ‘Eight years ago?’ said Falcón, looking up at the ceiling. ‘Is that interesting?’

  ‘That's the only thing I could find,’ said Ferrera, shrugging. ‘Margarita was seventeen and had already left school. The local police did nothing except check up on her about a month later and Marisa reported that she'd been found. Apparently, the girl had left home with a boyfriend that Marisa didn't know about. They'd gone to Madrid until their money ran out and then hitched back. That's it. End of story.’

  ‘Well, if nothing else, it gives me an excuse to go and see Marisa Moreno,’ said Falcón. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Did you see this message from the prison governor? Your meeting with Esteban Calderón is confirmed for one o'clock this afternoon.’

  ‘Perfect.’

  Ferrera left and Falcón was once again alone in his head with Marisa Moreno and Esteban Calderón. There was an obvious reason why Calderón was never far from his thoughts: the brilliant but arrogant instructing judge of the 6th June bombing had been found, days after the explosion, at an absolutely crucial moment of their investigation, trying to dispose of his prosecutor wife in the Guadalquivir river. Calderón's wife, Inés, was Javier Falcón's ex-wife. As the Homicide chief, Falcón had been called to the scene. When they'd opened the shroud around the body and he'd found himself looking down into Inés's beautiful but inanimate features he'd fainted. Given the circumstances, the investigation into Inés's murder had been handed over to an outsider, Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita from Madrid. In an interview with Marisa Moreno, Zorrita had discovered that, on the night of the murder, Calderón had left her, taken a cab home and let himself into his double-locked apartment. Zorrita had drawn together an extraordinary array of lurid detail involving domestic and sexual abuse, and extracted a confession from a stunned Calderón, who had been subsequently charged. Since then Falcón had spoken to the judge only once, in a police cell, shortly after the event. Now he was nervous, not because he feared a resurgence of the earlier emotions, but because, after all his file reading, he was hoping he'd found the smallest chink into the heart of the conspiracy.