LITMIR.BIZ

       3

       Seville Prison, Alcalá de Guadaira – Friday, 15th September 2006, 13.05 hrs

      Through the reinforced glass pane of the door, Falcón watched Calderón, who was hunched over the table, smoking, staring into the tin-foil ashtray, waiting for him. The judge, who'd been young for his position, looked older. He had lost his gilded, moisturized sheen. His skin was dull and he'd lost weight where there was none to lose, making him look haggard. His hair had never been luxuriant, but was now definitely thinning to baldness. His ears seemed to have got longer, the lobes fleshier, as if from some unconscious tugging while musing on the entanglements of his mind. It settled Falcón to see the judge so reduced; it would have been intolerable had the wife-beater been his usual arrogant self. Falcón opened the door for the guard, who held a tray of coffee, and followed him in. Calderón instantly reanimated himself into an approximation of the supremely confident man he had once been.

      ‘To what, or to whom, do I owe this pleasure?’ asked Calderón, standing up, sweeping his arm across the sparsely furnished room. ‘Privacy, coffee, an old friend … these unimaginable luxuries.’

      ‘I'd have come before now,’ said Falcón, sitting down, ‘but, as you've probably realized, I've been busy.’

      Calderón took a long, careful look at him and lit another cigarette, the third of his second pack of the day. The guard set down the tray and left the room.

      ‘And what could possibly make you want to come and see the murderer of your ex-wife?’

      ‘Alleged murderer of your wife.’

      ‘Is that significant, or are you just being accurate?’

      ‘This last week is the first time I've had since June to think and … do some reading,’ said Falcón.

      ‘Well, I hope it was a good novel and not the transcript of my interview with my Grand Inquisitor, Inspector Jefe Luis Zorrita,’ said Calderón. ‘That, as my lawyer will tell you, was not my finest hour.’

      ‘I've read that quite a few times and I've also gone over Zorrita's interview with Marisa Moreno,’ said Falcón. ‘She's been to see you a number of times, hasn't she?’

      ‘Unfortunately,’ said Calderón, nodding, ‘they've not been conjugal visits. We talk.’

      ‘About what?’

      ‘We were never very good at talking,’ said Calderón, drawing hard on his cigarette. ‘We had that other language.’

      ‘I was just thinking that maybe since you've been in here you might have developed some other communication skills.’

      ‘I have, but not particularly with Marisa.’

      ‘So why does she come to see you?’

      ‘Duty? Guilt? I don't know. Ask her.’

      ‘Guilt?’

      ‘I think there might be a few things she regrets telling Zorrita about,’ said Calderón.

      ‘Like what?’

      ‘I don't want to talk about it,’ said Calderón. ‘Not with you.’

      ‘Things like that little joke you had with Marisa about the “bourgeois solution” to costly divorce: … murder your wife.’

      ‘Fuck knows how that bastard Zorrita squeezed that out of her.’

      ‘Maybe he didn't have to squeeze too hard,’ said Falcón calmly.

      Calderón's cigarette stopped on the way to his mouth.

      ‘What else do you think she regretted talking to Zorrita about?’ asked Falcón.

      ‘She covered for me. She said I left her apartment later than I did. She thought she was doing me a favour, but Zorrita had all the timings from the cab company. It was a stupid thing to have done. It counted against me. Made me look as if I needed help, especially taken in conjunction with the cops finding me on the banks of the Guadalquivir river trying to dispose of Inés's body,’ said Calderón, who stopped, frowned and did some concentrated smoking. ‘What the fuck are you doing here, Javier? What's this all about?’

      ‘I'm trying to help you,’ said Falcón.

      ‘Are you now?’ said Calderón. ‘And why would you want to help the alleged murderer of your ex-wife? I realize that you and Inés weren't particularly close any more, but… still…’

      ‘You told me you were innocent. You've said so from the very beginning.’

      ‘Well, Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón, you're the expert on the murderer's constant state of denial,’ said Calderón.

      ‘I am,’ said Falcón. ‘And I'm not going to pretend to you that my investigation into what happened on that night doesn't have ulterior motives.’

      ‘All right,’ said Calderón, sitting back, paradoxically satisfied by this revelation. ‘I didn't think you wanted to save my ass … especially if you've read that transcript as many times as you said.’

      ‘There's some very ugly stuff in there, I can't deny that, Esteban.’

      ‘Nor can I,’ said Calderón. ‘I wouldn't mind turning back the clock on my whole relationship with Inés.’

      ‘I have some questions relating to the transcript,’ said Falcón, heading off a possible descent into self-pity. ‘I understand that the first time you hit Inés was when she discovered the naked photographs of Marisa on your digital camera.’

      ‘She was trying to download them on to her computer,’ said Calderón, leaping to his own defence. ‘I didn't know what her intentions were. I mean, it's one thing to find them, but it seemed to me that she was going to make use of them in some way.’

      ‘I'm sure Inés knew you very well, by then,’ said Falcón. ‘So why did you leave the camera hanging around? What were you thinking of, taking shots of your naked lover?’

      ‘ I didn't take them, Marisa did … while I was asleep. She was nice about it, though. She told me she'd left some “presents” on the camera,’ said Calderón. ‘And I didn't leave the camera hanging around. Inés went through my pockets.’

      ‘And what were you doing with the camera in the first place?’

      ‘I took some shots of a lawyers' dinner I'd attended earlier in the evening,’ said Calderón. ‘My alibi, if Inés found the camera.’

      ‘Which you knew she would.’

      Calderón nodded, smoked, searched his memory; something he did a lot these days.

      ‘I'd overslept at Marisa's,’ he said. ‘It was six o'clock in the morning and, you know, I wasn't as collected as I would have been normally. Inés appeared to be asleep. She wasn't. When I dropped

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