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happen in Cuba. My father never talked about it.’

      ‘So who looked after you?’

      ‘My father had girlfriends. Some were interested in us … others weren't.’

      ‘What did your father do in Cuba?’

      ‘He was somebody in the government. An official on the Sugar Board. Export,’ said Marisa. ‘I thought you wanted to talk about my sister, and I'm beginning to wonder why.’

      ‘I like to get people's family situation sorted out in my mind,’ said Falcón. ‘It doesn't sound like you had a normal life.’

      ‘We didn't, until my stepmother came along. She was a good woman. The caring type. She really looked after us. For the first time in our lives we were loved. She even looked after my father when he was dying.’

      ‘How was that?’

      ‘Lung cancer. Too many cigars,’ she said, waving the smoking stub in her hand. ‘He only married her after his diagnosis.’

      Marisa blew a plume of smoke out into the rafters of the wooden roof. She felt she had to keep this thing going. Do one long stint with this new inspector jefe and then maybe he'd leave her alone.

      ‘What did you do after your father died?’ asked Falcón.

      ‘We moved down here. My mother couldn't stand the north. All that rain.’

      ‘What about her family?’

      ‘Her parents were dead. She had a brother in Málaga, but he didn't like black people very much. He didn't come to her wedding.’

      ‘How did your mother die?’

      ‘Heart attack,’ said Marisa, eyes shining at the memory of it.

      ‘Were you living here at the time?’

      ‘I was in Los Angeles.’

      ‘I'm sorry,’ said Falcón. ‘That must have been hard. She wasn't very old.’

      ‘Fifty-one.’

      ‘Did you see her before she died?’

      ‘Is that any of your business?’ she said, turning away, looking for an ashtray.

      This cop was getting under her skin.

      ‘My mother died when I was five,’ said Falcón. ‘It doesn't matter whether you're five or fifty-five, it's not something you ever get over.’

      Marisa turned back slowly; she'd never heard a Sevillano, let alone a cop, talk like this. Falcón was frowning at the floor.

      ‘So you came back from Los Angeles and you've been here ever since?’ he said.

      ‘I stayed for a year,’ said Marisa. ‘I thought I should look after my sister.’

      ‘And what happened?’

      ‘She left again. But she was eighteen this time so …’

      ‘And you haven't seen or heard from her since?’

      There was a long silence in which Marisa's mind seemed to float off out of the room and Falcón thought for the first time that he was getting somewhere.

      ‘Señora Moreno?’ said Falcón.

      ‘I haven't heard from her … no.’

      ‘Are you worried about her?’

      She shrugged and for some reason Falcón didn't think he was going to believe what he heard next.

      ‘We weren't very close, which was why she left the first time without telling me.’

      ‘Is that right?’ said Falcón, locking eyes with her across the studio. ‘So what did you do when she left the second time?’

      ‘I finished the course I was doing at the Bella Artes, rented out my mother's apartment, which my sister and I had inherited…’

      ‘Is that where you live now, in Calle Hiniesta?’

      ‘And I went to Africa,’ she said, nodding. ‘Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Congo, until it got too dangerous and then I went to Mozambique.’

      ‘What about the Touaregs … didn't you spend some time with them?’

      Silence, as she registered that he'd heard that from someone else.

      ‘If you know all this, Inspector Jefe, why are you asking me?’

      ‘I know it, but hearing it from you arranges the furniture.’

      ‘I let you in here to talk about my sister.’

      ‘Who you're not close to.’

      ‘You seem to have expanded your interests since you started using up my work time.’

      ‘And then there was New York …?’

      She grunted. Puffed on the cigar to get it going again.

      ‘You've been talking to Esteban, haven't you?’

      ‘How do you know?’

      ‘I lied to him about New York,’ she said. ‘I saw a movie about an artist starring Nick Nolte, and I assumed the role of his assistant. I've never been to New York.’

      ‘Did you lie to him about anything else?’

      ‘Probably. I had an image to live up to.’

      ‘An image?’

      ‘That's how most of the men I've spent any time with see women.’

      ‘You described Esteban Calderón as your lover to Inspector Jefe Zorrita.’

      ‘He was then … still is, kind of, although prison doesn't help,’ she said. ‘I'm sorry he killed his wife. He was always so controlled, you know, still passionate in the way Sevillanos are, but a lawyer, too, and with a lawyer's mentality.’

      ‘So you think he did it?’

      ‘What I think doesn't matter. It's what Inspector Jefe Zorrita thinks that matters,’ she said, and something clicked in her mind. ‘That's it, I've got it now. It was your ex-wife that Esteban murdered. That's interesting.’

      ‘Is it?’

      ‘I don't know what you're doing here,’ she said, puffing on her cigar, appraising him anew.

      ‘Was your sister with a boyfriend when she left the second time?’

      ‘There was always a man involved with Margarita.’

      ‘Pretty girl?’

      ‘That … and the other thing.’

      ‘Sex?’

      ‘Not exactly,’ said Marisa, who went over to a small plans chest, opened a drawer and slapped a sheaf of photos down on the top. She was going to let him in, or rather let him think that she was opening up. ‘Take a look. I took these three weeks before her eighteenth birthday.’

      Falcón flicked through the shots. A sadness lodged itself in his chest. It wasn't sex, despite the provocative nudity. Even when she was lying back, legs splayed, she had an innocence about her. An innocence that itched to be desecrated in the eyes of men. That was why Marisa had taken the shots and only Marisa could have taken them. Even in the most pornographic of poses Margarita never lost her childlike purity, whereas the viewer, or the voyeur, felt the beast rise up on its hind legs and dance on its furry hooves.

      ‘For a Sevillano, you don't say very much, Inspector Jefe.’

      ‘Nothing to add,’ he said, giving up on the shots halfway through, feeling the woman's intention and not flattered by it. ‘They do their work.’

      ‘You're the first person to see those.’

      ‘I'd like a shot of Margarita

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