LITMIR.BIZ

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what are you doing here?’ asked Ahmed. ‘These people don’t go out. They’re permanent residents, barely capable of the simplest of things. Beyond the gates is as good as another planet to them.’

      Falcón looked down on Marta’s salt-and-pepper head, the white pad over her eyebrow, and an immense sadness broke inside his chest. Here was the real casualty of the Jiménez story.

      ‘Does she understand anything of what we say?’ he asked.

      ‘It depends,’ he said. ‘If you talked about C-A-T-S, she might react.’

      ‘What about A-R-T-U-R-O?’

      Ahmed’s face settled into a bland wariness, which Falcón had seen before in immigrants under police questioning. The blandness was to minimize any irritation in the officer, the wariness to combat intrusive questioning. It was an attitude that might have worked with Moroccan police, but it annoyed Falcón.

      ‘Her father has been murdered,’ he said quietly.

      Marta coughed once, twice and the third was followed by a stream of vomit, which pooled in her lap and dripped to the floor.

      ‘She’s in shock from her fall,’ said Ahmed, and moved away.

      Falcón sat on the bed, his face level with Marta’s. Vomit clung to some hairs on her chin. She was panting and not looking at him. Her hand still held the locket. Ahmed returned with new clothes and cleaning equipment on a trolley. He screened Marta off. Falcón sat across the room to wait. Under her bed was a small, padlocked metal trunk.

      The screens were pulled back and Marta reappeared in new clothes. Falcón walked with Ahmed as he pushed his trolley.

      ‘Have you ever talked to her about Arturo?’

      ‘It’s not my job. I’m qualified, but only in my own country. Here I am a nurse. Only the doctor talks to her about Arturo.’

      ‘Have you been present?’

      ‘I have not been in attendance, but I have been there.’

      ‘What’s her reaction to the name?’

      Ahmed performed his cleaning tasks on automatic.

      ‘She becomes very upset. She brings her fingers to her mouth and makes a noise, a kind of desperate pleading noise.’

      ‘Does she articulate anything?’

      ‘She is not articulate.’

      ‘But you spend more time with her, maybe you understand her better than the doctor.’

      ‘She says: “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my fault.”’

      ‘Do you know who Arturo is?’

      ‘I haven’t seen her case notes and nobody has seen fit to inform me.’

      ‘Who is her doctor?’

      ‘Dra Azucena Cuevas. She is on holiday until next week.’

      ‘What about the kitten? Wasn’t it you who brought in the kitten and she started …?’

      ‘There are no cats allowed on the ward.’

      ‘The locket round her neck, and the key — is that the key to the trunk under her bed? Do you know what she keeps in there?’

      ‘These people don’t have very much, Inspector Jefe. If I see something private, I leave it for them. It’s all they have apart from … life. And it’s amazing how long you survive if that is all you have.’

      That was Ahmed. A perfectly intelligent, reasonable and caring individual, but not an expansive one, not in front of authority. He had irritated Falcón. He tried to picture him as the blackness ripped past the window of the AVE, just as he had done José Manuel Jiménez, whose tormented features were pin-sharp in his mind. He failed because Ahmed had done what all immigrants seek to do. He’d blended in. He didn’t stand out. He’d merged with his drab, grey surroundings and disappeared into modern Spanish society.

      The trickle of these thoughts stopped as he found that the transparent reflection of the woman opposite was returning his look. He enjoyed this: to stare at his leisure as if he was doing nothing more than admiring the hurtling night. The flickering of sex started up in him. He had been celibate since Inés had left. Their sex had been nearly riotous in the early days. It made him pull at his collar to even think of it. Eating outside on the patio and Inés suddenly coming round to his side of the table and straddling him, tugging at his trousers, pushing his hands up her dress. Where had all that gone? How had marriage snuffed that out so quickly? By the end she wouldn’t let him look at her dressing. ‘You have no heart, Javier Falcón.’ What was she talking about? Did he watch blue movies? Did he fuck prostitutes while watching blue movies? Would he stamp out the existence of his own child? And yet … Raúl Jiménez still had, yes, the comfort of a beautiful woman. Consuelo, his consolation.

      The woman opposite was no longer meeting his eye in the glass. He turned to her real face. There was a small horror there, a minor pity as if she’d perceived the complications of a mid-forties man and wanted none of it. She dived into her handbag, would have liked it to swallow her whole, but it was a little Balenciaga number with room for a lipstick, two condoms and some folding money. He turned back to the glass. A small light hovered in the blackness, remote, with no other in sight.

      He slumped back exhausted from the endless cycles of thought, not of his investigation but of his failed marriage. That always induced some internal collapse as soon as he came up against the wall of Inés’s words: ‘No tienes corazón, Javier Falcón.’ It even rhymed.

      It was the new chemistry in his brain, he decided later, that had given him his first new thought about Inés, or rather a realization about an old thought. He wasn’t going to be able to move on, he wasn’t going to be able to flirt with a woman in a railway carriage until he’d proved to himself that Inés’s words were wrong, that they did not apply. It hit him harder than he’d expected. There was even a jolt of adrenalin, which should have meant fear, except that all he was doing was sitting in the AVE roaming around his own head, which contained the uncomfortable notion that she might be right.

      He drifted into sleep, a man in a silver bullet train speeding through the dark to an unknown destination. He had the dream again of being the fish; of flashing through the water with fear driving his tail as the visceral tug slowly tore through him. He came awake thumping his head into the seat. The carriage was empty, the train in the station, crowds of passengers pouring past his window.

      He went home and watched a movie without taking anything in. He turned off the television and collapsed unfed and unsettled into his bed. He dipped in and out of sleep, not wanting to have the dream again but not wanting to be awake with an anxious world outside his walls. Four o’clock brought him round into a permanent dark wakefulness and he worried about the new chemicals in his brain, which might alter the balance of his mind, while the wooden beams in his vast house groaned like other less fortunate inmates in a distant part of the asylum.

       Saturday, 14th April 2001

      He got up at 6 a.m. unrested, his nerves jangling like keys on a gaoler’s ring so that he actually started thinking about keys in the house and where they were, the ones that would open his father’s studio. He went to the desk in the study and found a whole drawer full of keys. How could there be so many doors? He took the drawer up to the wrought-iron gate that locked off the part of the gallery in front of his father’s studio. He tried them all, but none of them worked and he walked off, leaving the drawer there on the floor, the keys spread out.

      He showered, dressed, went out, bought a newspaper, the ABC, and drank a café solo. He checked the death notices. Raúl Jiménez was being buried today at eleven o’clock in the Cementerio de San Fernando. He drove to the office, checked the voice mail on his mobile, which was all from Ramírez.

      There was a full turnout of all six officers from the Grupo de Homicidios, which was not usual for a Saturday before Easter. He briefed them on the

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