LITMIR.BIZ

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are clean, as is the video, TV, the cabinet and the remote. This guy was prepared for his work.’

      ‘Guy?’ asked Falcón. ‘We haven’t talked about that yet.’

      Felipe fitted a pair of custom-made magnifying glasses to his face and began a minute inspection of the carpet.

      Falcón was amazed at the two forensics. He was sure they’d never seen anything as gruesome as this in their careers, not down here, not in Seville. And yet, here they were … He took a perfect square of ironed handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed his brow. No, it wasn’t Felipe and Jorge’s problem. It was his. They behaved like this because this was how he normally behaved and had told them it was the only way to work in a murder investigation. Cold. Objective. Dispassionate. Detective work, he could hear himself in the lecture theatre back in the academy, is unemotional work.

      So what was different about Raúl Jiménez? Why this sweat on a cool, clear April morning? He knew what they called him behind his back down at the Jefatura Superior de Policía on Calle Blas Infante. El Lagarto. The Lizard. He’d liked to think it was because of his physical stillness, his passive features, his tendency to look intensely at people while he listened to them. Inés, his ex-wife, his recently divorced wife, had cleared up that misunderstanding for him. ‘You’re cold, Javier Falcón. You’re a cold fish. You have no heart.’ Then what is this thing thundering away in my chest? He jabbed himself in the lapel with his thumb, found himself with his jaw clenched and Felipe looking up with fish aquarium eyes from the carpet.

      ‘I have a hair, Inspector Jefe,’ he said. ‘Thirty centimetres.’

      ‘Colour?’

      ‘Black.’

      Falcón went to the desk and checked the photograph of La Familia Jiménez. Consuelo Jiménez stood in a floor-length fur coat, her blonde hair piled high as confectionery while her three sons cheesed at the camera.

      ‘Bag it,’ he said, and called for the Médico Forense. In the photograph Raúl Jiménez stood next to his wife with his horse teeth grinning, his sagging cheeks looking like a grandfather and his wife, a daughter. Late marriage. Money. Connections. Falcón looked into Consuelo Jiménez’s brilliant smile.

      ‘Good carpet, this,’ said Felipe. ‘Silk. Thousand knots per centimetre. Good tight pile so that everything sits nicely on top.’

      ‘How much do you think Raúl Jiménez weighs?’ Falcón asked the Médico Forense.

      ‘Now I’d say somewhere between seventy-five and eighty kilos, but from the slack in his chest and waist I’d say he’s been up in the high nineties.’

      ‘Heart condition?’

      ‘His doctor will know if his wife doesn’t.’

      ‘Do you think a woman could lift him out of that low leather scoop and put him in that high-backed chair?’

      ‘A woman?’ asked the Médico Forense. ‘You think a woman did that to him?’

      ‘That was not the question, Doctor.’

      The Médico Forense stiffened as Falcón made him feel stupid a second time.

      ‘I’ve seen trained nurses lift heavier men than that. Live men, of course, which is easier … but I don’t see why not.’

      Falcón turned away, dismissing him.

      ‘You should ask Jorge about trained nurses, Inspector Jefe,’ said Felipe, arse up in the air, practically sniffing the carpet.

      ‘Shut up,’ said Jorge, tired of this one.

      ‘I understand it’s all to do with the hips,’ said Felipe, ‘and the counterweight of the buttocks.’

      ‘That’s only theory. Inspector Jefe,’ said Jorge. ‘He’s never had the benefit of practical experience.’

      ‘How would you know?’ said Felipe, kneeling up, grabbing an imaginary rump and giving it some swift thrusts with his groin. ‘I had a youth, too.’

      ‘Not much of one in your day,’ said Jorge. ‘They were all tight as clams, weren’t they?’

      ‘Spanish girls were,’ said Felipe. ‘But I come from Alicante. Benidorm was just down the road. All those English girls in the sixties and seventies …”

      ‘In your dreams,’ said Jorge.

      ‘Yes, I’ve always had very exciting dreams,’ said Felipe.

      The forensics laughed and Falcón looked down on them as they grovelled on the floor, rootling like pigs after acorns, with football and fucking fighting for supremacy in their brains. He found them faintly disgusting and turned to look at the photos on the wall. Jorge nodded his head at Falcón and mouthed to Felipe: Mariquita. Poof.

      They laughed again. Falcón ignored them. His eye, just as it did when he looked at a painting, was drawn to the edges of the photographic display. He moved away from the central celebrity section and found a shot of Raúl Jiménez with his arms around two men who were both taller and bigger than him. On the left was the Jefe Superior de la Policía de Sevilla, Comisario Firmin León and on the right was the Chief Prosecutor, Fiscal Jefe Juan Bellido. A physical pressure came down on Falcón’s shoulders and he shrugged his suit up his collar.

      ‘Aha! Here we go,’ said Felipe. ‘This is more like it. One pubic hair, Inspector Jefe. Black.’

      The three men turned simultaneously to the window because they’d heard muted voices from behind the double-glazing and a mechanical sound like a lift. Beyond the rail of the balcony two men in blue overalls slowly appeared, one with long black hair tied in a ponytail and the other crew cut with a black eye. They were shouting to the team eighteen metres below who were operating the lifting gear.

      ‘Who are those idiots?’ asked Felipe.

      Falcón went out on to the balcony, startling the two men standing on the platform, which had just been raised up a railed ladder from a truck in the street.

      ‘Who the hell are you?’

      ‘We’re the removals company,’ they said, and turned their backs to show yellow stencils on their overalls which read Mudanzas Triana Transportes Nacionales e Internacionales.

       2

       Thursday, 12th April 2001, Edificio Presidente, Los Remedios, Seville

      Juez Esteban Calderón signed off the levantamiento del cadáver, which had uncovered another piece of baggable evidence. Underneath the body was a piece of cotton rag, a sniff indicated traces of chloroform.

      ‘A mistake,’ said Falcón.

      ‘Inspector Jefe?’ questioned Ramírez, at his elbow.

      ‘The first mistake in a planned operation.’

      ‘What about the hairs, Inspector Jefe?’

      ‘If those hairs belonged to the killer … shedding it was an accident. Leaving a chloroform-soaked rag was an error. He put Raúl Jiménez out with the chloroform, didn’t want to put the rag in his pocket, threw it on the chair and then dumped Don Raúl on top of it. Out of sight, out of mind.’

      ‘It’s not such an important clue …”

      ‘It’s an indication of the mind we’re working against. This is a careful mind but not a professional one. He might be slack in other areas, like where he got the chloroform. Maybe he bought it here in Seville from a medical or laboratory supplies shop or stole it from a hospital or a chemist. The killer has thought obsessively about what he wants to do to his victim but not all the details around it.’

      ‘Sra Jiménez has been located and informed. A car

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