Robert Wilson - The Silent and the Damned aka The Vanished Hands

'It's OK, Javier, I can take it,' said Consuelo. 'Despite the attractions of the detective/suspect dynamic I'd rather you eliminated me from your inquiries with whatever ugly questions you have to ask. I have a good memory and I did not enjoy being accused of Raúl's murder.'

'Well, these are just the preliminaries. I'm hoping for some harder facts on which to base my suspicions about the way in which the Vegas died. So you'll be seeing me again.'

'I look forward to it.'

'How did you get into the grounds of the Vegas' house?'

'Lucia gave me the code to open the gate.'

'Did anybody else know that?'

'The maid. Probably Sergei. I've no idea, but the Krugmans' garden butts on to the Vegas' and there's a gate at the bottom, so they would have access. As for Pablo Ortega, I don't know.'

'Sergei?' said Falcón. 'You said he was a Russian or Ukrainian. That's a bit unusual.'

'Even you must have noticed the number of Eastern Europeans around these days,' said Consuelo. 'I know it's wrong, but I think people prefer them to Moroccans.'

'What do you know about Madeleine Krugman?'

'She's friendly in the way that Americans are… immediately.'

'You could say the same of the Sevillanos.'

'Perhaps that's why we get so many Americans here every year,-' said Consuelo. 'I'm not complaining, by the way.'

'She's an attractive woman,' said Falcón.

'Rafael's never had it so good in your eyes,' she said. 'Anyway, all men think Madeleine Krugman is attractive – even you, Javier. I saw you looking.'

Falcón flushed like a fifteen year old, grinned and ran through a range of displacement activity. Consuelo gave him a sad smile from the sofa.

'Maddy knows her power,' she said.

'So she's the femme fatale of the barrio?' asked Falcón.

'I'm trying to edge her out,' said Consuelo, 'but she's got a few years on me. No. She just knows that men melt around her. She does her best to ignore it. What's a girl supposed to do when everybody from the gas man to the fishmonger to the Juez de Instruction and the Inspector Jefe de Homicidios seem to have lost control of their lower jaws?'

'What about Sr Krugman?'

'They've been married a long time. He's older.'

'Do you know what they're doing here?'

'Taking a break from living in America. He works for Rafael. He's designing, or has designed, a couple of his projects.'

'Were they taking a break after 9/11?'

'That happened while they were here,' she said. 'They were living in Connecticut, he was working in New York and I think they just got bored…'

'Children?'

'I don't think so.'

'Have you been to any social occasions there?'

'Yes… Rafael was there, too.'

'But not Lucia?'

'Too much for her.'

'Any observations?'

'I'm sure he was probably interested in the idea of having sex with her because that's what travels through every man's brain when they see Maddy Krugman, but I don't think it happened.'

There was a loud bellow from upstairs, the terrible noise of an animal in pain. It shot up Consuelo's spineand jerked her to her feet. Falcón scrambled out of his chair. Feet rumbled down the stairs. Mario in a pair of shorts and shirt came running down the corridor. He had his arms held out from his puny body, his head thrown back, eyes closed, mouth open in a silent scream. The famous war photograph of the napalm attack on a Vietnam village snapped into Falcón's mind but not focused on the central figure of a naked Vietnamese girl running down the road. It was on the boy in front of her, his black mouth stretched open, crammed full of horror.

Wednesday, 24th July 2002

In his passport photo Martin Krugman, without his beard, looked his age, which was fifty-seven years old. With the beard, which was grey and had been allowed to grow untrimmed, he looked beyond retirement age. Life had been kinder to Madeleine Krugman who was thirty-eight and looked no different from her passport photo taken when she was thirty-one. They could have been father and daughter, and many people would have preferred it that way.

Marty Krugman was tall and rangy, some might say skinny, with a prominent nose which, face on, was blade thin. His eyes were set close together, well back in his head and operated under eyebrows which his wife had given up trying to contain. He did not look like a man who slept much. He drank cup after cup of thick espresso coffee poured from a chrome coffee- maker. Marty was not dressed for the office. His shirt was nearly cheesecloth with a blue stripe, which he wore like a smock outside his faded blue jeans. He had Outward Bound sandals on his feet and sat with an ankle resting on his knee and his hands clinging on to his shin as if he was pulling on an oar. He spoke perfect Spanish with a Mexican inflexion.

'Spent my youth in California,' he said. 'Berkeley, doing Engineering. Then I took some years out in New Mexico painting in Taos and taking trips down to Central and South America. My Spanish is a mess.'

'Was that in the late sixties?' asked Falcón.

'And seventies. I was a hippy until I discovered architecture.'

'Did you know Sr Vega before you came here?'

'No. We met him through the estate agent who rented the house to us.'

'Did you have any work?'

'Not at that stage. We were playing it fast and easy. It was lucky that we met Rafael in the first few weeks. We got talking, he'd heard of some of my New York stuff and he offered me some project work.'

'It was very lucky,' said Madeleine, as if she might have flown the coop if it hadn't worked out.

'So you came here on a whim?'

Maddy had changed out of the white linen trousers into a knee-length skirt which flared out over her cream leather chair. She crossed and uncrossed her very white legs several times a minute and Falcón, who was sitting directly opposite her, annoyed himself by looking every time. Her breasts trembled under her blue silk top with every movement. Hormonal sound waves seemed to pulse out into the room as her blue blood ticked under her white skin. Marty was impervious to it all. He didn't look at her or react to anything she said. When she spoke his gaze remained fixed on Falcón, who was having trouble finding a resting place for his own eyes with the whole room now an erogenous zone.

'My mother died and I inherited some money,' said Maddy. 'We thought we'd take a break and be in Europe for a while… visit our old honeymoon haunts: Paris, Florence, Prague. But we went to Provence and then Marty had to see Barcelona… get his Gaudi fix, and one thing led to another. We found ourselves here. Seville gets into your blood. Are you a Sevillano, Inspector Jefe?'

'Not quite,' he said. 'When did all this happen?'

'March last year.'

'Were you taking a break from anything in particular?'

'Just boredom,' said Marty.

'Your mother's death, Sra Krugman… was that sudden?'

'She was diagnosed with cancer and died within ten weeks.'

'I'm sorry,' said Falcón. 'What was boring you in America, Sr Krugman?'

'You can call us Maddy and Marty if you like,' she said. 'We prefer to be relaxed.'

Her perfect white teeth appeared behind her chilli- red lips in a two centimetre smile and were gone. She spread her fingers out on the leather arms of the chair and switched her legs over again.

'My job,' said Marty. 'I was bored with the work I was doing.'

'No you weren't,' she said, and their eyes met for the first time.

'She's right,' said Marty, his head slowly coming back to Falcón. 'Why would I be working here if I was bored with my job? I was bored with being in America. I just didn't think you'd be interested in that. It's not a detail that's going to help you find out what happened to the Vegas.'