The Blind Man of Seville Read online

  ‘I don’t know … the normality, the portentous normality.’

  ‘We all need a little fear to keep us going,’ said Falcón, looking down his red tie, the sweat tumbling out of his forehead again.

  There was a thump from under the desk as Jorge’s head hit the underside.

  ‘Joder.’ Fuck. ‘You know what this is?’ said Jorge, backing out from under the desk. This is a chunk of Raúl Jiménez’s tongue.’

  Silence from the three men.

  ‘Bag it,’ said Falcón.

  ‘We’re not going to find any prints,’ said Felipe. ‘These slipcases are clean, as is the video, TV, the cabinet and the remote. This guy was prepared for his work.’

  ‘Guy?’ asked Falcón. ‘We haven’t talked about that yet.’

  Felipe fitted a pair of custom-made magnifying glasses to his face and began a minute inspection of the carpet.

  Falcón was amazed at the two forensics. He was sure they’d never seen anything as gruesome as this in their careers, not down here, not in Seville. And yet, here they were … He took a perfect square of ironed handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed his brow. No, it wasn’t Felipe and Jorge’s problem. It was his. They behaved like this because this was how he normally behaved and had told them it was the only way to work in a murder investigation. Cold. Objective. Dispassionate. Detective work, he could hear himself in the lecture theatre back in the academy, is unemotional work.

  So what was different about Raúl Jiménez? Why this sweat on a cool, clear April morning? He knew what they called him behind his back down at the Jefatura Superior de Policía on Calle Blas Infante. El Lagarto. The Lizard. He’d liked to think it was because of his physical stillness, his passive features, his tendency to look intensely at people while he listened to them. Inés, his ex-wife, his recently divorced wife, had cleared up that misunderstanding for him. ‘You’re cold, Javier Falcón. You’re a cold fish. You have no heart.’ Then what is this thing thundering away in my chest? He jabbed himself in the lapel with his thumb, found himself with his jaw clenched and Felipe looking up with fish aquarium eyes from the carpet.

  ‘I have a hair, Inspector Jefe,’ he said. ‘Thirty centimetres.’

  ‘Colour?’

  ‘Black.’

  Falcón went to the desk and checked the photograph of La Familia Jiménez. Consuelo Jiménez stood in a floor-length fur coat, her blonde hair piled high as confectionery while her three sons cheesed at the camera.

  ‘Bag it,’ he said, and called for the Médico Forense. In the photograph Raúl Jiménez stood next to his wife with his horse teeth grinning, his sagging cheeks looking like a grandfather and his wife, a daughter. Late marriage. Money. Connections. Falcón looked into Consuelo Jiménez’s brilliant smile.

  ‘Good carpet, this,’ said Felipe. ‘Silk. Thousand knots per centimetre. Good tight pile so that everything sits nicely on top.’

  ‘How much do you think Raúl Jiménez weighs?’ Falcón asked the Médico Forense.

  ‘Now I’d say somewhere between seventy-five and eighty kilos, but from the slack in his chest and waist I’d say he’s been up in the high nineties.’

  ‘Heart condition?’

  ‘His doctor will know if his wife doesn’t.’

  ‘Do you think a woman could lift him out of that low leather scoop and put him in that high-backed chair?’

  ‘A woman?’ asked the Médico Forense. ‘You think a woman did that to him?’

  ‘That was not the question, Doctor.’

  The Médico Forense stiffened as Falcón made him feel stupid a second time.

  ‘I’ve seen trained nurses lift heavier men than that. Live men, of course, which is easier … but I don’t see why not.’

  Falcón turned away, dismissing him.

  ‘You should ask Jorge about trained nurses, Inspector Jefe,’ said Felipe, arse up in the air, practically sniffing the carpet.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Jorge, tired of this one.

  ‘I understand it’s all to do with the hips,’ said Felipe, ‘and the counterweight of the buttocks.’

  ‘That’s only theory. Inspector Jefe,’ said Jorge. ‘He’s never had the benefit of practical experience.’

  ‘How would you know?’ said Felipe, kneeling up, grabbing an imaginary rump and giving it some swift thrusts with his groin. ‘I had a youth, too.’

  ‘Not much of one in your day,’ said Jorge. ‘They were all tight as clams, weren’t they?’

  ‘Spanish girls were,’ said Felipe. ‘But I come from Alicante. Benidorm was just down the road. All those English girls in the sixties and seventies …”

  ‘In your dreams,’ said Jorge.

  ‘Yes, I’ve always had very exciting dreams,’ said Felipe.

  The forensics laughed and Falcón looked down on them as they grovelled on the floor, rootling like pigs after acorns, with football and fucking fighting for supremacy in their brains. He found them faintly disgusting and turned to look at the photos on the wall. Jorge nodded his head at Falcón and mouthed to Felipe: Mariquita. Poof.

  They laughed again. Falcón ignored them. His eye, just as it did when he looked at a painting, was drawn to the edges of the photographic display. He moved away from the central celebrity section and found a shot of Raúl Jiménez with his arms around two men who were both taller and bigger than him. On the left was the Jefe Superior de la Policía de Sevilla, Comisario Firmin León and on the right was the Chief Prosecutor, Fiscal Jefe Juan Bellido. A physical pressure came down on Falcón’s shoulders and he shrugged his suit up his collar.

  ‘Aha! Here we go,’ said Felipe. ‘This is more like it. One pubic hair, Inspector Jefe. Black.’

  The three men turned simultaneously to the window because they’d heard muted voices from behind the double-glazing and a mechanical sound like a lift. Beyond the rail of the balcony two men in blue overalls slowly appeared, one with long black hair tied in a ponytail and the other crew cut with a black eye. They were shouting to the team eighteen metres below who were operating the lifting gear.

  ‘Who are those idiots?’ asked Felipe.

  Falcón went out on to the balcony, startling the two men standing on the platform, which had just been raised up a railed ladder from a truck in the street.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘We’re the removals company,’ they said, and turned their backs to show yellow stencils on their overalls which read Mudanzas Triana Transportes Nacionales e Internacionales.

  2

  Thursday, 12th April 2001, Edificio Presidente, Los Remedios, Seville

  Juez Esteban Calderón signed off the levantamiento del cadáver, which had uncovered another piece of baggable evidence. Underneath the body was a piece of cotton rag, a sniff indicated traces of chloroform.

  ‘A mistake,’ said Falcón.

  ‘Inspector Jefe?’ questioned Ramírez, at his elbow.

  ‘The first mistake in a planned operation.’

  ‘What about the hairs, Inspector Jefe?’

  ‘If those hairs belonged to the killer … shedding it was an accident. Leaving a chloroform-soaked rag was an error. He put Raúl Jiménez out with the chloroform, didn’t want to put the rag in his pocket, threw it on the chair and then dumped Don Raúl on top of it. Out of sight, out of mind.’

  ‘It’s not such an important clue …”

  ‘It’s an indication of the mind we’re working against. This is a careful mind but not a professional one. He might be slack in other areas, like where he got the chloroform. Maybe he bought it here in Seville from a medical or laboratory supplies shop or stole it from a hospital or a chemist. The killer has thought obsessively about what he wants to do to his victim but not all the details around it.’

  ‘Sra Jiménez has been located and informed. A car will drop the kids at her sister’s house in San Bernardo and bring her on alone.’

  ‘When will the Médico Forense do the autopsy?’ asked Falcón.

  ‘Do you want to be there?’ asked Cal
derón, weighing his mobile. ‘He said that he was going to do it immediately.’

  ‘Not particularly,’ said Falcón. ‘I just want the results. There’s a lot to do here. This film, for instance. I think we should all watch the La Familia Jiménez movie now before Sra Jiménez arrives. Is there anybody else from the squad here, Inspector?’

  ‘Fernández is talking to the conserje, Inspector Jefe.’

  ‘Tell him to collect all the tapes from the security cameras, view them with the conserje and make a note of anybody he doesn’t recognize.’

  Ramírez made for the door.

  ‘And another thing … find somebody to check all the hospitals, laboratories and medical supply shops for chloroform sold to odd people or missing bottles of the stuff. And surgical instruments, too.’

  Falcón rolled the TV/video cabinet back to its normal position in the corner of the room. Calderón sat in the leather scoop chair. Falcón plugged the equipment back in. Ramírez stood by the dead man’s chair, which was wrapped in plastic, ready to be taken down to the Policía Científica laboratories. He murmured into his mobile. Calderón ejected the tape, inspected the reels, put it back in and hit the rewind button.

  ‘The removals men are still here, Inspector Jefe.’

  ‘There’s no one to talk to them now. Let them wait.’

  Calderón hit ‘play’. They took seats around the room and watched in the sealed silence of the empty apartment. The footage opened with a shot of the Jiménez family coming out of the Edificio Presidente apartment building. Raúl and Consuelo Jiménez were arm in arm. She was in an ankle-length fur coat and he was in a caramel overcoat. The boys were all dressed identically in green and burgundy. They walked straight towards the camera, which was across the street from them, and turned left into Calle Asunción. The film cut to the same family group in different clothes on a sunny day coming out of the Corte Inglés department store on La Plaza del Duque de la Victoria. They crossed the road into the square, which was full of stalls selling cheap jewellery and shawls, CDs, leather bags and wallets. The group disappeared into Marks & Spencer’s. The family group were shown again and again until two of the three men were stifling yawns amidst the shopping malls, the beach gatherings, the paseos in the Plaza de España and the Parque de María Luisa.

  ‘Is he just showing us he did his homework?’ asked Ramírez.

  ‘Impressively dull, isn’t it?’ said Falcón, not finding it so, finding himself oddly fascinated by the altering dynamics of the family group in the different locations. He was drawn to the idea of the family, especially this apparently happy one, and what it would be like to have one himself, which led him to think how it was that he had singularly failed in this capacity.

  Only a change in the direction of the movie snapped him back. It was the first piece of footage where the family didn’t appear as a group. Raúl Jiménez and his boys were at the Betis football stadium on a day when, it was clear from the scarves, they were playing Sevilla — the local derby.

  ‘I remember that day,’ said Calderón.

  ‘We lost 4–0,’ said Ramírez.

  ‘You lost,’ said Calderón. ‘We won.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Ramírez.

  ‘Who do you support, Inspector Jefe?’ asked Calderón.

  Falcón didn’t react. No interest. Ramírez glanced over his shoulder, uncomfortable with his presence.

  The camera cut to the Edificio Presidente. Consuelo Jiménez on her own, getting into a taxi. Cut to her paying the taxi off in a tree-lined street, waiting some moments while the car pulled away before crossing the road and walking up several steps to a house.

  ‘Where’s that?’ asked Calderón.

  ‘He’ll tell us,’ said Falcón.

  A series of cuts showed Consuelo Jiménez arriving at the same house on different days, in different clothes. Then the house number — 17. And the street name — Calle Río de la Plata.

  ‘That’s in El Porvenir,’ said Ramírez.

  ‘This is the future,’ said Calderón. ‘I think we have a lover here.’

  Cut to night-time and the rear of a large E-Class Mercedes with a Seville number plate. The image held for some time.

  ‘He doesn’t move his plot on very well,’ said Calderón, reaching his boredom threshold quickly.

  ‘Suspense,’ said Falcón.

  Finally Raúl Jiménez got out of the car, locked it, stepped out of the street lighting and into the dark. Cut to a fire burning in the night, figures standing around the leaping flames. Women in short skirts, some with their suspenders and stocking tops showing. One of them turned, bent over and put her bottom to the fire.

  Raúl Jiménez appeared at the edge of the fire. An inaudible discussion ensued. He strode back to the Mercedes with one of the women following, stumbling in her high heels over the rough ground.

  ‘That’s the Alameda,’ said Ramírez.

  ‘Only the cheapest for Raúl Jiménez,’ said Falcón.

  Jiménez pushed the girl into the back seat, holding her head down as if she were a police suspect. He looked up and around and followed her in. The frame held the rear door of the Mercedes, shadowy movements beyond the glass. No more than a minute passed and Jiménez got out of the car, straightened his fly and held out a note to the girl, who took it. Jiménez got back into the driver’s seat. The car pulled away. The girl spat a fat gob on to the dirt, cleared her throat and spat again.

  ‘That was quick,’ said Ramírez, predictable.

  More night-time footage followed. The pattern was the same, until an abrupt change of scene put the camera in a corridor with light falling into it from an open door at the end on the left. The camera moved down the corridor gradually revealing a lighter square on the wall at the end with a hook above it. The three men were suddenly transfixed, as they knew they were looking at the corridor outside the room where they were sitting. Ramírez’s hand twitched in that direction. The camera shook. The suspense tightened as the three lawmen’s heads surged with the horror of what they might be about to see. The camera reached the edge of light, its microphone picked up some groaning from the room, a shuddering, whimpering moan of someone who might be in terrible agony. Falcón wanted to swallow but his throat refused. He had no spit.

  ‘Joder,’ said Ramírez, to break the tension.

  The camera panned and they were in the room. Falcón was so spooked that he half expected to see the three of them sitting there, watching the box. The camera focused first on the TV, which, at this remove, was running with waves and flickering but not so much that they couldn’t see the graphic performance of a woman masturbating and felating a man whose bare buttocks clenched and unclenched in time.

  The camera pulled back to a wide shot, Falcón still blinking at the confusion of sound and expected image. Kneeling on the Persian carpet looking up at the TV screen was Raúl Jiménez, shirt-tails hanging over his backside, socks halfway up his calves and his trousers in a pile behind him. On all fours in front of him was a girl with long black hair, whose still head informed Falcón that she was staring at a fixed point, thinking herself elsewhere. She was making the appropriate encouraging noises. Then her head began to turn and the camera spun wildly out of the room.

  Falcón was on his feet, thighs crashing into the edge of the desk.

  ‘He was there,’ he said. ‘He was … I mean, he was here all the time.’

  Ramírez and Calderón jerked in their seats at Falcón’s outburst. Calderón ran his hand through his hair, visibly shaken. He checked the door from where the camera had just been looking into the room. Falcón’s mind bolted, didn’t know what it was looking at any more. Image or reality. He started, went on to his back foot, tried to shake his vision free of what was in his head. There was someone standing in the doorway. Falcón pinched his eyes shut, reopened them. He knew this person. Time decelerated. Calderón crossed the room with his hand out.

  ‘Señora Jiménez,’ he said. ‘Juez Esteban Calderón, I am sorry for your loss
.’

  He introduced Ramírez and Falcón, and Sra Jiménez, with mustered dignity, stepped into the room as if over a dead body. She shook hands with the men.

  ‘We weren’t expecting you so soon,’ said Calderón.

  ‘The traffic was light,’ she said. ‘Did I startle you, Inspector Jefe?’

  Falcón adjusted his face, which must have had the remnants of that earlier wildness.

  ‘What was that you were watching?’ she asked, assuming control of the situation, used to it.

  They looked at the screen. Snow and white noise.

  ‘We weren’t expecting you … ‘ started Calderón.

  ‘But what was it, Señor Juez? This is my apartment. I should like to know what you were looking at on my television.’

  With Calderón taking the pressure, Falcón watched at leisure and, although he was sure he didn’t know her, he at least knew the type. This was the sort of woman who would have turned up at his father’s house, when the great man was still alive, looking to buy one of his late works. Not the special stuff, which had made him famous. That was long gone to American collectors and museums around the world. This type was looking to buy the more affordable Seville work — the details of buildings: a door, a church dome, a window, a balcony. She would have been one of those tasteful women, with or without tiresome wealthy husband in tow, who wanted to have their slice of the old man.

  ‘We were watching a video, which had been left in the apartment,’ said Calderón.

  ‘Not one of my husband’s … ‘ she said, hesitating perfectly to let them know that ‘dirty’ or ‘blue’ was unnecessary. ‘We had few secrets … and I did happen to see the last few seconds of what you were watching.’

  ‘It was a video, Doña Consuelo,’ said Falcón, ‘which had been left here by your husband’s murderer. We are the three officers of the law who will be running the investigation into your husband’s death and I thought it important that we saw the film as soon as possible. Had we known that you would be so prompt …’

  ‘Do I know you, Inspector Jefe?’ she asked. ‘Have we met?’