LITMIR.BIZ

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shrugged.

      ‘In your faculty would it be easy to get hold of such a chemical as chloroform?’

      ‘Very easy.’

      ‘And saline solution and scalpels and cutting scissors?’

      ‘Of course, there’s a laboratory.’

      ‘You see those figures in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture … what do they say?’

      ‘02.36. 12.04.01.’

      ‘Who were you going to see in the Edificio Presidente at that time?’

      He pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezed his eyes shut.

      ‘Can we talk about this in private?’ he asked.

      ‘We’re all interested parties here,’ said Ramírez.

      ‘Twenty-five minutes after you entered that building Raúl Jiménez was murdered,’ said Falcón, who saw now that Lucena, rather than considering him as a persecutor wanted him as a friend. It was the woman he feared.

      ‘I went to the eighth floor,’ said Lucena, throwing his hands up.

      An unexpected answer, which had Ramírez reaching for his notebook.

      ‘The eighth floor?’ said Sra Jiménez.

      ‘Orfilia Trinidad Muñoz Delgado,’ said Ramírez.

      ‘She must be ninety years old,’ said Sra Jiménez.

      ‘Seventy-four,’ said Ramírez. ‘And there’s Marciano Joaquín Ruíz Pizarro.’

      ‘Marciano Ruiz, he’s the theatre director,’ said Falcón.

      Lucena nodded up at him.

      ‘I know him,’ said Falcón. ‘He’s been to see my father, but he’s …’

      ‘Un maricón; said Sra Jiménez, deep-voiced, brutal.

      Ramírez, like some mugging comic actor, took a quick step back, stared down at Lucena. Falcón used his mobile to call Fernández, who told him that there’d been no reply from the Ruíz apartment when he’d called that afternoon.

      ‘He’s not in today,’ said Lucena. ‘He dropped me off at work and went to Huelva. He’s rehearsing Lorca’s Bodas de Sangre.’

      The air thermals changed in the room. Sra Jiménez charged out of her chair before there was any chance of intervention. Her hand swung back and made nasty contact with the corner of Lucena’s head. It wasn’t a slap, more of a thud. All those rings, thought Falcón.

      ‘Hijo de puta,’ she roared from the door.

      Blood trickled down the side of Lucena’s face. The front door slammed. Heels split the paving stones.

      ‘I don’t get it,’ said Ramírez, more relaxed now that the woman was out of the room. ‘Why were you fucking her if you’re a …’

      Lucena took a packet of tissues out, dabbed his forehead.

      ‘Can you just explain that to me?’ said Ramírez. ‘I mean, you’re one or the other, aren’t you?’

      ‘Do I have to put up with this imbecile?’ Lucena asked Falcón.

      ‘Unless you want to spend a long time down at the Jefatura, yes.’

      Lucena got to his feet, put his hands in his pockets, walked to the centre of the room and turned to Ramírez. His weakness had been replaced by an aristocratic, vindictive smoothness of the sort employed by fops who’ve been asked for the satisfaction of a duel.

      ‘I fucked her because she reminded me of my mother,’ he said.

      It was a calculated offence, which had its desired effect of shocking Ramírez, who Lucena could see was from a different class to his own. The Inspector was from a conservative, working-class Sevillano family and lived with his wife and two daughters in his parents’ house. His mother was still alive and living with them and when his father-in-law died, which would be any week now, his mother-in-law would join them. Ramírez balled his fist. Nobody talked like that about mothers to him.

      ‘We’re leaving now,’ said Falcón, gripping Ramírez by his swollen bicep.

      ‘I want to get … I want to get the phone number of the other maricón,’ said Ramírez, the words bottling in his throat. He wrenched his arm away from Falcón.

      Lucena went to the desk, slashed a pen across some paper and handed it to Falcón, who manoeuvred Ramírez out of the room.

      Outside the Calle Río de la Plata was moving as slowly as the river through Buenos Aires. Sra Jiménez was down at the end of the street, her rage bristling in the sunlight. Ramírez was no less angry. Falcón stood between them, no longer the detective, more the social worker.

      ‘Get Fernández on the mobile,’ he said to Ramírez. ‘See if they’ve found the girl yet.’

      Lucena’s door slammed shut. Falcón headed down the street to Consuelo Jiménez thinking: Was that the sophistication you were talking about that so entranced you? What are we now? Where are we? This society with no rules of engagement.

      She was crying, but from anger this time. She gritted her teeth and stamped her feet in humiliation. Falcón drew alongside her, hands in pockets. He nodded as if agreeing with her but thinking: This is policework — one moment on the brink of cracking the case and packing up early for celebratory beers and the next back on the street wondering how you could have been so facile.

      ‘I’ll run you back to your sister’s house,’ he said.

      ‘What did I do to him?’ she asked. ‘What did I ever do to him?’

      ‘Nothing,’ said Falcón.

      ‘What a day,’ she said, looking up into the perfect sky, all serenity a long way off, beyond the stratosphere. ‘What a fucking day.’

      She stared into the mash of tissue in her hand like a haruspex who might find reason, clarity or a future. She threw it in the gutter. He took her arm and turned her towards the car. As he helped her in, Ramírez said they’d found the girl from the Alameda and were taking her down to the Jefatura on Blas Infante.

      ‘Tell Fernández to interview that last employee that Sra Jiménez fired. Pérez should leave the girl to sweat until we get there. I want all reports filed at four-thirty before we go to see Juez Calderón at five.’

      Falcón called Marciano Ruíz’s mobile and told him he would have to come back to Seville to make a statement tonight. There was a protest from Ruíz, which was followed by a threat from Falcón to arrest Lucena.

      ‘Are you calm?’ he asked Ramírez, who nodded over the roof of the car. ‘Take Sr Lucena down to the Jefatura and get a written statement out of him … and don’t be rough.’

      Falcón led Lucena out of his house and put him in the back of Ramírez’s car. They all left. Falcón hunched over the steering wheel, muttering in his head as the tyres hissed down Avenida de Borbolla. Everybody was mental today. Some cases did this. They grated too much. Normally the child cases. The kidnapping followed by the wait and the inevitable discovery of the abused body. This was the same … as if something terrible had been added to the excesses of the human experience and had subtracted something greater which could never be replaced. The daylight would always be a little dimmer, the air never quite as fresh.

      ‘Do you see a lot of this?’ asked Sra Jiménez. ‘Yes, I suppose you do, I suppose you see it all the time.’

      ‘What?’ said Falcón, shrugging, knowing what she meant, not wanting to get into it.

      ‘People with perfect lives, who see them destroyed in a matter of … ‘

      ‘Never,’ he replied at the edge of vehemence.

      That

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