LITMIR.BIZ

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Eve 1963. He was standing by the stairs in his pyjamas, waist height to all the leaving guests, who were going down to the port for the firework display. Mercedes, his second mother, his father’s second wife, picked him up and took him back upstairs to bed. This smell was in her hair, Celtas; somebody must have been smoking the same brand at the party. There were still plenty Of Spaniards in Tangier in those days, even though the really good times were long over. Mercedes had put him to bed, kissed him hard, squeezed him to her bosom. He left the memory at that point. He never took it forward from there because … he just didn’t. He was interested to find that this new smell could take him back to that time. Normally he only ever thought of Mercedes when he came across Chanel No.5, her perfume of choice.

      A knock at the door brought him back. Serrano and Baena stood in the corridor.

      ‘You were quick,’ said Falcón.

      The two men shuffled in, uneasy with their boss who they assumed was being sarcastic. They’d been forty minutes.

      ‘Traffic,’ said Baena, which solved the problem both ways.

      Falcón was mystified by the sight of the cigarette reduced to an ash snake in front of him. A glance at his watch left him stunned to find that it was past eleven o’clock and he’d achieved nothing. He checked his notes to see when Ramírez had timed the removals men’s lunch break and ordered Serrano and Baena to go out on the streets to try to find a witness who’d seen someone, probably in overalls, climbing up the lifting gear to the sixth floor of the Edificio Presidente.

      Sub-Inspector Pérez called saying the maid, Dolores Oliva, had finally come round. She wouldn’t speak until she had a rosary in her hand and throughout the interview she fingered a key ring of the Virgen del Rocío. She was convinced she had come into contact with pure evil and that it might have found a way in. Falcón tapped the desk. It was always like this with Pérez. The academy and eleven years in the field had not been able to break down his need to tell a story in a report. It took eight minutes for him to reveal that Dolores Oliva had opened the door with five turns of the key.

      Falcón cut Pérez off and told him to get down to Los Remedios as soon as possible to work the apartments in the block with the print-outs of the unidentified persons from the CCTV tapes. The prostitute had to be identified and found, too. He hung up and saw that there was a message for him from the Médico Forense saying that the autopsy was complete and a written report was being typed out. He thought for a moment about whether he should let Consuelo Jiménez see the body in its full horror and decided that it would be better to keep the eyelid removal as police information only. He called the Médico Forense back and asked him to make the body clean and presentable.

      He arranged to pick up Consuelo Jiménez from her sister’s house in San Bernardo and went down to his car calling Fernández and telling him to make contact with Pérez to work the apartments.

      It was fiercely bright outside after the darkness of the apartment and nearly warm. It was always the same around Semana Santa and the Feria, a most ambiguous time of year. Neither hot nor cold. Neither dry nor wet. Neither religious nor secular. He got into his car and threw the sheaf of old photographs on the seat. The one of Gumersinda, Raúl’s first wife, was on top. It was a formal shot and she was staring earnestly into the camera, but it was Consuelo Jiménez’s words that came to mind: ‘He totally failed to love me.’ Two bizarre thoughts clashed in his mind, squirting adrenalin into his system, which made him start the car and pull out without looking. Tyres squealed. A muffled shout of ‘Cabrón!‘ reached him.

      He made a U-turn and crossed the river over the Puente del Generalísimo. The port railway tracks streamed beneath him and the cranes formed a guard of honour down to the massive Puente del V Centenario, which rose out of the urban mist. His thoughts burgeoned as he headed northeast past the Parque de María Luisa and he desperately wanted that cigarette he’d let burn to ash in Raúl Jiménez’s study. What had come into his mind were the words of his wife, Inés, whom he, too, had failed to love: ‘You have no heart, Javier Falcón,’ and this had been entangled with the sight of Gumersinda, a woman from his mother’s era, which had made him think of his blood mother, Pilar, and then his stepmother, Mercedes. All these women, immensely important to him, he now thought he’d somehow failed.

      The idea was so new and peculiar it made him quite desperate to be active and unconscious.

      He sat at the traffic lights, his fingers jittering over the steering wheel, muttering: ‘This is madness’ because this did not happen to him. He did not have random inexplicable thoughts. He had never been by nature a day-dreamer. He had always been calm and methodical, which characteristics could not be applied to him now. From the moment he’d seen Raúl’s terrible face there’d been something no less cataclysmic than a genetic mutation. His mind was flooding with uncomfortable memories, sweat welled up from his forehead and dampened his hands, his concentration was shot. He hadn’t even got this investigation under control. He hadn’t checked the windows and doors out on to the balcony in the Jiménez apartment. First steps. And that business with the TV, yanking the cord out of the wall and not mentioning it. It was unprofessional. It was not him.

      He cruised up Calle Balbino Murrón right to the end, to a building that overlooked the soccer pitch in the Colegio de los Jesuitas. He put the photos in the glove compartment. Consuelo Jiménez came out on her own before he reached the house. A child, probably the youngest, stood in the window. She waved and the boy waved frantically back. It saddened Falcón. He saw himself in the window, left behind.

      They set off, cutting across the main arterial roads going into the centre of town. She looked straight ahead, not taking much in beyond the glass.

      ‘Have you told the children yet?’ he asked.

      ‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to tell them and then leave them to go to the hospital.’

      ‘They must know something is wrong.’

      ‘They see I’m nervous. They don’t know why they are with their aunt. They keep asking me why we aren’t in the house in Heliopolis and when is Daddy going to bring the present he promised.’

      ‘The dog?’

      ‘You can be quite impressive, Inspector Jefe,’ she said. ‘You don’t have children, do you?’

      ‘No … ‘ he said, wanting to fill that out somehow.

      They continued in silence, heading north towards La Macarena.

      ‘How is the investigation going?’ she asked, polite, distant.

      ‘It’s early days.’

      ‘So you only have the obvious motive to go on.’

      ‘Which is?’

      ‘Wife wants to get rid of unloving older husband, inherit his fortune and disappear with younger lover.’

      ‘People have killed for less.’

      ‘I gave you that motive. There’s no one who could have told you that Raúl Jiménez didn’t love me.’

      ‘What about Basilio Lucena?’

      ‘He only knows that Raúl was impotent and that I have physical needs.’

      ‘Do you know where he was last night?’

      ‘Ah, yes, of course. It would be the lover who would do the deed,’ she said. ‘You’ll meet Basilio and then you must tell me what you think he’s capable of.’

      They passed the Basilica de La Macarena and a few minutes later pulled up by an austere grey building on Avenida Sánchez Pizjuan that housed the Instituto Anatómico Forense. A crowd of people were gathered outside the doors. Falcón parked up inside the hospital barrier. Consuelo Jiménez put on a pair of sunglasses. The crowd were on them as soon as they got out of the car, Dictaphones pointing. Loose words blasted out from the cacophony and cut like shrapnel — ‘marido’, ‘asesinado’, ‘brutalmente’. Falcón took her by the arm and pushed past them, got her through the door and slammed it behind him.

      He

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