‘What's your point?’
‘First of all, how did Marisa find out that you'd been beating Inés? She didn't have a bruised face. Did you tell her?’
‘No.’
‘Maybe one of the ugly lessons she learnt in her early life in Havana was how to spot an abused woman.’
‘Your point, Javier?’ said Calderón, with courtroom lawyer's steel.
‘Marisa gave Zorrita the impression that Inés had the upper hand. She mentioned Inés's phrase several times: “La puta con el puro.”’ The whore with the cigar.
‘That's what she told me,’ said Calderón, listening hard now.
‘Zorrita thought Marisa had told him all that because she was still furious at being shamed by Inés in public, but clearly she wasn't. Marisa crushed Inés. The witness said that Inés went off like “the village cur”. So what was Marisa's purpose in telling Zorrita about that meeting?’
‘You think it was calculated,’ said Calderón.
‘I listened to the tape. Zorrita only had to prod her a couple of times to get the story out of her. And the story, her version of it, was crucial in redoubling your motive to beat Inés and perhaps take it too far and kill her. Now that would be a story that you'd want to keep out of the investigating officer's mind at all costs.’
Calderón was smoking so intently that he was making himself dizzy with the nicotine rush.
‘My final question to do with the transcript,’ said Falcón. ‘Inspector Jefe Zorrita came to see me some hours after he'd interviewed you. I asked if you'd broken down and confessed, and his answer was: sort of. He admitted that when you refused a lawyer – God knows what you were thinking of at that moment, Esteban – it meant that he could be more brutal with you in the interview. That, combined with the horror of the autopsy revelations, seemed to create doubt in your mind and, Zorrita reckoned, it was then that you believed that you could have done it.’
‘I was very confused,’ said Calderón. ‘My hubris was in refusing the lawyer. I was a lawyer. I could handle myself.’
‘When Zorrita asked you to describe what happened when you went back to your apartment that night, he said you rendered the events in the form of a film script.’
‘I don't remember that.’
‘You used the third person singular. You were describing something you'd seen … as if you were out of your body, or behind a camera. It was clear you were in some kind of trance. Didn't your lawyer mention any of this?’
‘Maybe he was too embarrassed.’
‘There seems to be some confusion about what you saw when you came into the apartment,’ said Falcón.
‘My lawyer and I have talked about that.’
‘In your film script version, you describe yourself as “annoyed”, because you didn't want to see Inés.’
‘I didn't want a confrontation. I wasn't angry, as I had been when Marisa told me about meeting Inés in the Murillo Gardens. I was pretty much asleep on my feet. Those were long days. All the work, followed by media engagements in the evening.’
Falcón flipped over another page of his notebook.
‘What interested me was when you said: “He stumbled into the bedroom, collapsed on to the bed and passed out immediately. He was aware only of pain. He lashed out wildly with his foot. He woke up with no idea where he was.” What was all that about?’
‘Is that a direct quote?’
‘Yes,’ said Falcón, putting the dictaphone on the table and pressing ‘play’.
Calderón listened, transfixed, as the smoke crawled up the valleys of his fingers.
‘Is that me?’
Falcón played it again.
‘It doesn't seem that important.’
‘I think Marisa put a cigarette lighter to your foot,’ said Falcón.
Calderón leapt to his feet as if he'd been spiked from underneath.
‘My foot was sore for days,’ he said, with sudden recall. ‘I had a blister.’
‘Why would Marisa put a cigarette lighter to your foot?’
‘To wake me up. I was dead to the world.’
‘There are more charming ways to wake your lover up than burning his foot with a cigarette lighter,’ said Falcón. ‘I think that she had to wake you up because the timing of your departure from her apartment was crucial.’
Calderón sank back into his chair, lit another cigarette and stared up into the light coming in through the high, barred window. He blinked as his eyes filled and he bit down on his bottom lip.
‘You're helping me,’ said Calderón. ‘The irony's not lost on me, Javier.’
‘You need different help to what I can give you,’ said Falcón. ‘Now, let's just go back to my original point from the transcript. Just one more thing about that night. The two versions you gave Zorrita about how you found Inés in the apartment.’
Calderón's brain snapped back into some pre-rehearsed groove and Falcón held up his hand.
‘I'm not interested in the version you and your lawyer have prepared for court,’ said Falcón. ‘Remember, none of this is about your case. What I'm trying to do might help you, but the design is not to get you off the hook, it's for me to find my way in.’
‘To what?’
‘The conspiracy. Who planted that small Goma 2 Eco bomb in the basement mosque, which exploded on the 6th of June, detonating the hundred kilos of hexogen stored there, bringing down the apartment building and destroying the pre-school?’
‘Javier Falcón keeps his promise to the people of Seville,’ said Calderón, grunting.
‘Nobody's forgotten that… least of all me.’
Calderón leaned across the table, looked up through the pupils of Falcón's eyes into the top of his cranium.
‘Do I detect something of an obsession going on here?’ he said. ‘Personal crusades, Javier, are not advisable in police work. Every old people's home in Spain probably has a retired detective gaping from the windows, his mind still twisted around a missing girl, or a poor, bludgeoned boy. Don't go there. Nobody expects it of you.’
‘People remind me of it all the time in the Jefatura and in the Palacio de Justicia,’ said Falcón. ‘And what's more, I expect it of myself.’
‘See you in the loony bin, Javier. Save me a place by the window,’ said Calderón, sitting back, inspecting the conical ember of his cigarette.
‘We're not going to end up in the loony bin,’ said Falcón.
‘You're pretty keen to get me down on some shrink's couch,’ said Calderón, dredging for lost confidence. ‘And you know what I say? Fuck off, you and anybody else. Mind your own madness. You especially, Javier. It's been less than five years since your “complete breakdown” – wasn't that what they called it? – and I can see you've been working hard. God knows how many times you went through the files on the bombing before you started combing Zorrita's reports, looking for the flaws in my case. You should get out more, Javier. Have you fucked that Consuelo yet?’
‘Let's get back to what happened at around 4 a.m. on Thursday 8th June in your apartment in Calle San Vicente,’ said Falcón, tapping his notebook. ‘In one version you came in to see Inés standing at the sink and you were “so happy to see her”, and yet in the other version you were “annoyed”, there was some sort of hiatus, you woke up lying in the corridor and when you went back to the kitchen you found Inés dead on the floor.’
Calderón swallowed hard as he replayed that night in the darkness of his mind. He had done it so many times, more times than even the most obsessive director would have edited, and re-edited, a scene from a movie. It now played in short sequences, but in reverse. From that moment of intense guilt when, trapped in the patrolman's torch beam, he'd been discovered trying to throw Inés into the river, to that blissful, pre-lapsarian state when he'd got out of the cab, helped by the driver, and walked up the stairs to his apartment, with no other intention than to get into bed as quickly as possible. And that was the point he always seized on: he knew at that moment he did not have murder on
his mind.
‘There was no intent,’ he said, out loud.
‘Start from the beginning, Esteban.’
‘Look, Javier, I've tried it every which way: forwards, backwards and inside out, but however hard I try there's always a gap,’ said Calderón, lighting another cigarette from the stub of the last one. ‘The cab driver opened the apartment door for me, two turns of the key. He left me there. I went into the apartment. I saw the light from the kitchen. I remember being annoyed – and I repeat, “annoyed”, not angry or murderous. I was just irritated that I might have to explain myself when all I wanted to do was crash out. So I remember that emotion very clearly, then nothing until I woke up on the floor in the corridor beyond the kitchen.’
‘What do you think about Zorrita's theory, that people have blank moments about terrible things they have done?’
‘I've come across it professionally. I don't doubt it. I've searched every corner of my mind…’
‘So what was this about seeing Inés alive and being so happy?’
‘My lawyer tells me that Freud had a term for that: “wish fulfilment”, he called it,’ said Calderón. ‘You want something to be true so badly that your mind invents it for you. I did not want Inés to be dead on the floor. We were not happy together, but I did not want her dead. I wanted her to be alive so badly that my mind substituted the reality with my most fervent wish. Both versions came out in the turmoil of that first interview with Zorrita.’
‘You know that this is the crux of your case,’ said Falcón. ‘The flaws I've found are small. Marisa going through your pockets, getting the upper hand in the shouting match with Inés in the Murillo Gardens and burning your foot to wake you up. These things amount to nothing when put against your recorded statement, in which you say that you entered the double-locked apartment alone, saw Inés alive, blacked out and then found her dead. Your inner turmoil and all that wish-fulfilment crap is no match for those powerful facts.’
More concentrated smoking from Calderón. He scratched at his thinning hair and his left eye twitched.
‘And why do you think Marisa is the key?’
‘The worst possible thing that could have happened at that moment in our investigation into the bombing was to have our instructing judge, and our strongest performer in front of the media, arrested for the murder of his wife,’ said Falcón. ‘Losing you pretty well derailed the whole process. If your disgrace was planned, then Marisa was crucial to its execution.’
‘I'll speak to her,’ said Calderón, nodding, his face hardening.
‘You won't,’ said Falcón. ‘We've stopped her visits. You're too desperate, Esteban. I don't want you to give anything away. What you've got to do is unlock your mind and see if you can find any detail that might help me. And it might be advisable to get a professional in to do that for you.’
‘Ah!’ said Calderón, getting it finally. ‘The shrink.’
4
Puti Club, Estepona, Costa del Sol – Friday, 15th September 2006, 14.35 hrs
Leonid Revnik was still sitting at Vasili Lukyanov's desk in the club, but this time he was waiting for news from Viktor Belenki, his second-in-command. When Revnik had taken control of the Costa del Sol after the police had mounted Operation Wasp in 2005, he'd got Belenki to run the construction businesses through which they laundered most of the proceeds of their drugs and prostitution trade. Belenki had just the right veneer of the good-looking, successful businessman and he spoke fluent Spanish, too. The veneer, though, was only an expensive suit thick, as Viktor Belenki was a violent brute with access to a rage so incandescent that even Revnik's most psychopathic henchmen were afraid of him. Belenki could also be very friendly and extremely generous, especially if you jumped when he told you to. This meant that he had developed good contacts in the Guardia Civil, some of whom had thick wads of Belenki's euros hidden in their garages. Leonid Revnik was hoping that Belenki could tell him where the money and disks that Lukyanov had stolen from the puti club safe had ended up. He was on his third cigar of the day. The empty safe was still gaping. The air-con was on the blink and he was uncomfortably hot. The mobile on the desk rang.
‘Viktor,’ said Revnik.
‘It's taken some time to get this information because it's out of the normal area of my guy's jurisdiction,’ said Belenki. ‘The Guardia Civil who went to the scene of the accident came from a town outside Seville called Utrera. When they found the money they called the police headquarters in Seville and, because it was clear that this wasn't just any old guy who'd died in a car accident, they went to the top for instructions: Comisario Elvira.’
‘Shit,’ said Revnik.
‘And he put it in the hands of Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón. Remember him?’
‘Everybody remembers him from the bombing in June,’ said Revnik. ‘So where's it all gone?’
‘It's in the Jefatura in Seville.’
‘Have we still got somebody in there?’
‘That's how I know where everything is.’
‘Right, so how do we get it out?’
‘You can say goodbye to the money,’ said Belenki. ‘Once the forensics have been over it, they'll stick it in the bank – unless you want to hold up a Prosegur van.’
‘I don't give a fuck about the money. I mean, I do, but … you're right. The disks, they're a different matter,’ said Revnik. ‘What can we get on Falcón?’
‘You're not going to be able to buy him, that's for sure.’
‘So what else?’
‘There's always the woman,’ said Belenki. ‘Consuelo Jiménez.’
‘Ah, yes, the woman,’ said Revnik.
At the traffic lights Falcón searched his eyes in the rear-view mirror, trying to find the evidence of obsession Calderón had seen there. He didn't really need to look at the tell-tale blackberry smudges; he knew from the slight gaucherie in his left hand, and that feeling of wearing someone else's right leg, that what was cradled in his mind was beginning to have physical manifestations.
Work had sat on Falcón's shoulders like an overweight, badly packed rucksack, and it never slipped off, not even at night. In the mornings he opened an eye, his face crushed hard into the pillow after snatching an hour's lethal sleep, to feel his bones creaking in his skeleton. The week's holiday he'd taken at the end of August, when he'd joined his friend Yacoub Diouri and his family on the beach at Essaouira in Morocco, had worn off on his first day back in the office.
Horns blared behind him. He pulled away from the traffic lights. He came into the old city through the Puerta Osario. He parked badly near the San Marcos church and walked down Calle Bustos Tavera to the tunnelled passageway that led from the street into a courtyard of workshops where Marisa Moreno had her studio. His footsteps sounded loud on the large cobbles of the dark tunnel. He broke out into the fierce light in the courtyard, squinted against it to take in the dilapidated buildings, the grass growing up through old rear axles and expired fridges. He walked up a metal stairway to a doorway above a small warehouse. Foot shuffling and dull thuds came from inside. He knocked.
‘Who is it?’
‘Police.’
‘ Momentito.’
The door was opened by a tall, slim mulatto woman with an unusually long neck, who had wood chips stuck to her face and in her coppery hair, which was tied back. She wore a cobalt-blue gown under which she was naked apart from some bikini briefs. Sweat pimpled across her forehead, over the undulation of her nose and trickled down the visible bones of her chest. She was breathing heavily.
‘Marisa Moreno?’ he said, holding up his police ID. ‘I am Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón.’
‘I've already told Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita everything I know a couple of hundred times,’ she said. ‘I've got nothing to add.’
‘I've come to talk to you about your sister.’
‘My sister?’ she said, and Falcón did not miss the momentary fear that froze her features.
‘You have a sister called Margarita.’
> ‘I know my own sister's name.’
Falcón paused, hoping that Marisa might feel the need to fill the moment with more information. She stared him out.
‘You reported her missing in 1998, when she was two months short of her seventeenth birthday.’
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Don't touch anything.’
The studio's floor was patched with rough concrete where the clay tiles had come up. The air smelled of bare timber, turps and oils. There were chippings everywhere and a pile of sawdust in the corner. A meat hook large enough to take a full carcass hung from the tie rod which spanned the room. Suspended from its sharp hook was an electric chain saw, its flex thrown over the bar. Three dark and polished statues stood beneath the oily, sawdust-encrusted tool, one with its head missing. Falcón made for the space around the piece. The headless statue was that of a young woman, with breasts high on her chest, perfect orbs. The faces of the men flanking her had nothing in them. Their eyes were blank. The musculature of their bodies had something of the savagery of an existence in the wild about them. Their genitals were outsized and, despite being flaccid, seemed sinister, as if they were spent from a recent rape.
Marisa watched him as he took the piece in, waiting for the banality of his comments. She had yet to meet the white man who could resist a little critique, and her warriors with their prize penises drew plenty of lewd admiration. What she registered in Falcón's face was not even a raised eyebrow, but a brief revulsion as he looked down the bodies.
‘So what happened to Margarita?’ he asked, switching to Marisa. ‘You reported her missing on 25th May 1998, and when the police came to check with you a month later you said she'd turned up again about a week after she'd disappeared.’
‘That was how much they cared,’ she said, reaching for a small half-smoked cigar which she relit. ‘They took down her details and I never heard from them again. They wouldn't take my calls, and when I went round to the station they just dismissed me, said she was with some boyfriend or other. If you're pretty and mulatto like her they just think you're some kind of fucking machine. I'm sure they did nothing.’