The Blind Man of Seville Read online

  She turned to face him full on, her dark fur-collared coat open, a black dress underneath. Not someone to be inappropriately dressed for any occasion. She gave him the full force of her attractiveness. Her blonde hair was not quite so structured as in the desk photograph but the eyes were bigger, bluer and icier in reality. Her lips, which controlled and manipulated her dominating voice, were edged with a dark line just in case you might be foolish enough to think that her soft, pliable mouth could be disobeyed.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

  ‘Falcón … ‘ she said, feeling the rings on her fingers as she looked him up and down. ‘No, it’s too ridiculous.’

  ‘What is, may I ask, Doña Consuelo?’

  ‘That the artist, Francisco Falcón, should have a son who is the Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homicidios de Sevilla.’

  She knows, he thought … God knows how.

  ‘So … this film,’ she said, turning on Ramírez, sweeping her coat back and fitting her fists into her waist.

  Calderón’s eyes flashed across her breasts before they locked on to Falcón over her left shoulder. Falcón shook his head slowly.

  ‘I don’t think this is something you should see, Doña Consuelo,’ said the young judge.

  ‘Why? Is it violent? I don’t like violence,’ she said, without unfixing Ramírez from her gaze.

  ‘Not physically,’ said Falcón. ‘I think you might find it uncomfortably intrusive.’

  The reels of the video squeaked. It was still playing. Sra Jiménez picked up the remote from the corner of the desk and rewound the tape. She pressed ‘play’. None of the men intervened. Falcón shifted to catch her face. Her eyes narrowed, she pursed her lips and gnawed at the inside of her cheek. Her eyes opened as the silent film played. Her face slackened, her body recoiled from the screen as she began to realize what she was watching, as she saw her children and herself become the study of her husband’s killer. When they reached the end of her first taxi ride, to what everybody now knew was 17 Calle Río de la Plata, she stopped the tape, threw the remote at the desk and walked swiftly from the room. The men tossed silence between them until they heard Sra Jiménez retching, groaning and spitting in her halogen-lit, white marble bathroom.

  ‘You should have stopped her,’ said Calderón, pushing his hand through his hair again, trying to shift some of the responsibility. The two policemen said nothing. The judge looked at his complicated watch and announced his departure. They agreed to meet after lunch, five o’clock in the Edificio de los Juzgados, to present their initial findings.

  ‘Did you see that photograph on the end there by the window?’ asked Falcón.

  ‘The one of León and Bellido?’ said Calderón. ‘Yes, I did, and if you look a bit closer you’ll see there’s one of the Magistrado Juez Decano de Sevilla in there, too. Old hawk eyes, Spinola, himself.’

  ‘There’s going to be some pressure on this case,’ said Ramírez.

  Calderón chucked his mobile from one hand to the other, slipped it in his pocket and left.

  3

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

  Falcón told Ramírez to interview the removals men — specifically to ask them when they arrived and left, and whether their gear was unattended at any stage.

  ‘You think that’s how he got in?’ asked Ramírez, the man incapable of just doing something.

  ‘This is not an easy building to get into and out of without being seen,’ said Falcón. ‘If the maid confirms that the door was double locked when she arrived this morning, it’s possible he used the lifting gear to get in. If it wasn’t then we’ll have to scrutinize the closed-circuit tapes.’

  ‘That takes a lot of nerve, Inspector Jefe,’ said Ramírez, ‘to wait in here for more than twelve hours.’

  ‘And then slip out when the maid came in to find the body.’

  Ramírez bit his bottom lip, unconvinced that that sort of steel in a man existed. He left the room as if more questions were about to turn him back.

  Falcón sat at Raúl Jiménez’s desk. All the drawers were locked. He tried a key from a set on the desk, which opened all the drawers down both sides, while another opened the central one. Only the top two drawers on either side had anything in them. Falcón flicked through a stack of bills, all recent. One caught his attention, not because it was a vet’s bill for a dog’s vaccinations, and there had been no evidence of any dog, but rather that it was his sister’s practice and it was her signature on the bill. It unnerved him, which was illogical. He dismissed it as another non-coincidence.

  He went through the central drawer, which contained several empty Viagra packets and four videos. From their titles, they seemed to be blue movies. They included Cara o Culo II, the sequel to the video whose slipcase had been left empty on the TV cabinet. It occurred to him that they hadn’t found the porn video that was showing on the TV while Raúl was with the prostitute. He shut the drawer. He began a detailed inspection of the photographs behind him. He thought that Raúl Jiménez might have known his father. He was, after all, a famous painter, a well-known figure in Seville society, and Jiménez seemed to be a celebrity collector. As he worked his way from the centre out to the edges he realized that this was a collection of a different order of celebrity. There was Carlos Lozano, the presenter of El Precio Justo. Juan Antonio Ruiz, known in the bullring as ‘Espartaco’. Paula Vázquez, the presenter of Euromillón. They were all TV faces. There were no writers, painters, poets, or theatre directors. No anonymous intellectuals. This was the superficial face of Spain, the Hola! crowd. And when it wasn’t, it was the bourgeoisie. The police, the lawmen, the functionaries who would make Raúl Jiménez’s life easier. The glamour and the graft.

  ‘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 o
n 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.’

  ‘Then you must have been abroad for a long time to learn your … gravity.’

  ‘I was in Barcelona for twelve years and four years each in Zaragoza and Madrid before I arrived back here.’

  ‘It sounds as if you’ve been demoted.’

  ‘My father was ill. I asked to be transferred to be close to him.’

  ‘Did he recover?’

  ‘No. He didn’t make it to the new millennium.’

  ‘We have met before, Inspector Jefe,’ she said, stubbing out the cigarette.

  ‘Then I don’t remember.’

  ‘At your father’s funeral,’ she said. ‘We are talking about Francisco Falcón.’

  ‘You couldn’t believe it before,’ he said, thinking: Let’s see how this changes your tune.

  ‘Was that who you were looking for in the photographs?’ she asked, and he nodded. ‘You wouldn’t find him there. He was not Raúl’s kind of celebrity. He never came to any of the restaurants. I doubt they knew each other. I went to the funeral because I knew him. I own three of his paintings.’

  He imagined his father with Consuelo Jiménez. His father had liked attractive women, especially if they bought his stupid paintings … but this one? Maybe that would have interested him. The showy, slightly tacky dresser with a razor tongue and a well-honed intuition. The usual crowd who bought his paintings always tried to say something ‘intelligent’ about them, when there was nothing intelligent in them. Consuelo Jiménez wouldn’t have done that. She would have found something different to say to his father, perhaps made a personal observation, even attempted a small perception, which most people, standing under the fierce reflection of his colossal fame, would never have dared. Yes. And his father would have risen to that. Definitely.

  ‘So you were completely involved in your husband’s business affairs?’ he said.

  ‘What happened to his house on Calle Bailén?’

  ‘I live in it,’ he said. ‘And you would know if your husband had any enemies.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘Just as he did,’ said Falcón. ‘Your husband … he must have trodden on people on his way up to the top. There are probably people out there who would …’

  ‘Yes, there are people out there who would gladly see him dead, especially those he’d corrupted and who are now free from the weight of their obligation.’

  She flicked a derisory fingernail at the functionary end of the photograph gallery.

  ‘If you know something … it would help.’

  ‘Ignore me. I’m being facetious,’ she said. ‘If there had been any corruption I would not have known about it. I ran the restaurants. I designed the interiors. I organized the flower arrangements. I made sure the produce for the kitchens was of the highest quality. But, as you can probably imagine, even without knowing my husband, I did not make contact with a single peseta of real money, nor did I deal with any of the powers, legal or otherwise, who let Raúl build, who licensed him, and who made sure there were no … unforeseen circumstances.’

  ‘So it is possible that …’

  ‘Very unlikely, Inspector Jefe. If something goes wrong in that department the stink soon gets into the restaurants and nothing reached my nose smelling that bad.’

  Falcón decided he’d let this woman run free for long enough. It was time she understood what had happened here. Time she stopped looking at this as a news item that didn’t affect her. Time to bring her inside.

  ‘Your husband’s body is undergoing an autopsy at the moment. In due course we will have to go to the Instituto Anatómico Forense for you to identify the body. You will see for yourself that your husband’s murder was extraordinary, more extraordinar
y than any I have seen in my career.’

  ‘I saw the killer’s little production for myself, Inspector Jefe. To spy on a family like that you would have to be profoundly disturbed.’

  ‘You happened to see the last few moments of the video when you first arrived. Perhaps you were not aware of what you were looking at,’ he said. ‘Your husband was entertaining a prostitute in here last night. The killer filmed it. We think that he may have got into this apartment much earlier, around lunchtime, using the removals company’s lifting gear, and that he was hiding in here, waiting for his moment.’

  Her eyes widened. She grabbed for the cigarettes and lit up, spanned her forehead with her hand.

  ‘I was here yesterday afternoon with the children before we went to the Hotel Colón,’ she said, on her feet now, pacing the length of the desk.

  ‘We found your husband sitting in the twin of that chair,’ said Falcón, not taking his eyes off her. ‘His forearms, ankles and head had been secured with flex. He was barefoot because his socks had been used to gag him. He was being forced to watch something on the screen, something so horrific to him that he fought with all his strength not to see it.’

  As he said this it occurred to him that it was only half true. The on-screen horror might have been the start of it, but what made Raúl Jiménez writhe convulsively was coming round in agony to find that a madman had cut his eyelids off. After that he’d have known there was nothing to lose and he’d have fought like a dog until his heart gave out.

  ‘What was he being forced to watch?’ she asked, confused. ‘I didn’t see …’

  ‘What you saw had a certain amount of horror for you personally. Being stalked is creepy, but it’s not something that you would fight to the point of self-mutilation not to see.’

  She sat down straight in the chair, knees pressed together like a good little girl. She leaned forward, grasping her shins, holding herself in.

  ‘I can’t think,’ she said. ‘I can’t think of anything like that.’

  ‘Nor can I,’ said Falcón.

  She drew on the cigarette, spat out the smoke as if it was disgusting. Falcón searched for any hint of pretence.