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

They went down in the lift. Ferrera sighed with her head to one side as if the pain of the exchange had found its way into her neck and cricked it for good. They drove in silence into the centre of town where Falcón was going to drop her off. She shut the car door and walked back to a crossing. Falcón pulled out and drove around the Plaza Nueva. He turned right into Calle Mendez Nunez and waited by El Corte Ingles. As he veered away from the Plaza de la Magdalena and prepared to turn down Calle Bailén his mobile went off.

'I don't want to sound like an idiot in my first week,' said Cristina Ferrera, 'but I think you're being followed. It was a blue Seat Cordoba two cars behind you. I got the plates.'

'Phone them through to the Jefatura and get them to give me a call,' said Falcón. 'I'll check it out.'

In the fading light he could still distinguish colour and he picked out the Seat, now only a single car behind him, as he eased past the Hotel Colón. He drove past the tile shop just before his house and turned up the short driveway and parked between the orange trees. He got out. The blue Seat stopped in front of him. It seemed to be a full car. He walked towards it and the car, in no hurry, pulled slowly away. He even had time to see the plates before it turned left past the Hotel Londres on the corner.

The Jefatura called him on his mobile and told him that the registration number reported by Cristina Ferrera did not match a blue Seat Cordoba. He told them to report it to the traffic police to see if they could get lucky.

He opened up the doors to his house, parked the car and closed them. He felt uneasy. His flesh crawled. He stood in the patio and looked around, listening as if he might be being burgled. The noise of distant traffic came to him. He went to the kitchen. Encarnación, his housekeeper, had left him some fish stew in the fridge. He boiled some rice, warmed the stew and drank a glass of cold white wine. He ate facing the door in a strange state of expectancy.

After eating he did something that he hadn't done for a long time. He picked up a bottle of whisky and a tumbler of ice and went to his study. He'd installed a grey velvet chaise longue he'd moved down from one of the upstairs rooms. He lay down on it with a good measure of whisky in the glass, which he rested on his chest. He was exhausted by the day's events but sleep, for many reasons, was a long way off. Falcón drank the whisky more methodically than he approached any of his investigations. He knew what he was doing – it takes some purpose to blot out damage. By the bottom of the third glass he'd worked over Mario Vega's new childhood and Sebastián Ortega's difficult life with a famous father. Now it was Inés's turn. But he was lucky. His body wasn't used to this level of alcohol and he quietly passed out with his cheek on the soft grey pelt of the chaise longue.

Thursday, 25th July 2002

The heat did not back off during the night. By the time Falcón arrived at the Jefatura at 7.30 a.m. the street temperature was 36°C and the atmosphere as oppressive as an old regime. The short walk from his car to the office with a hangover like a hatchet buried in his head left him gasping, with odd flashes of light going off behind his eyes.

At one of the desks in the outer office he was surprised to find Inspector Ramírez already at work, two thick fingers poised over the computer keyboard. Falcón had always doubted that he and Ramírez would ever be friends since he'd taken the job that Ramírez had thought should have been his. But he'd been getting on better with his number two in the last four months since he'd started full-time work again. While Falcón had been suspended from duty due to depressive illness, Ramírez had seized the opportunity for command with both hands, only to find that he didn't like it. Its pressures did not suit his personality. Not only did he lack the necessary creative streak to launch a new investigation, but he could be explosive and divisive. In January Falcón had returned to part-time work. By March he had been reinstated as Inspector Jefe full time and Ramírez had been grateful. These developments had reduced the tension within the squad. They now rarely used each other's ranks in addressing each other in private.

'My God,' said Ramírez, 'what happened to you?'

'Buenos dias, José Luis. It was a bad day for children, yesterday,' said Falcón. 'I got friendly with the whisky again. How did it go at the hospital?'

Ramírez stared up from the desk and Javier had the vertiginous experience of teetering over two dark, empty lift shafts which led directly to this man's pain and intolerable uncertainty.

'I haven't slept,' said Ramírez. 'I've been to early- morning Mass for the first time in thirty years and I've confessed my sins. I've prayed harder than I've ever done in my life – but it doesn't work like that, does it? This is my penance. I must watch the sufferings of the innocent.'

He breathed in and covered his cheeks with his hands.

'They're keeping her in for four days to conduct a series of tests,' he said. 'Some of these tests are for very serious conditions like lymphatic cancer and leukaemia. They have no idea what the problem is. She's thirteen years old, Javier, thirteen.'

Ramírez lit a cigarette and smoked with one arm across his chest as if he was holding himself together. He talked about the tests as if he'd already confirmed to himself that she had something serious and the terrible words of future treatment were creeping into his vocabulary – chemotherapy, nausea, hair loss, crashing immune system, risk of infection. Footage came to Falcón's lurid mind of huge-eyed children beneath the perfect domes of their fragile craniums.

His cigarette suddenly tasted foul to Ramírez, who crushed it out and spat the smoke into his lap as if it was responsible for his child's health. Falcón talked him down, reminded him that these were just tests, to stay calm and positive and that he could take any time off that he needed. Ramírez asked to be put to work to stop his endlessly revolving thoughts. Falcón brought him into his office, took another two aspirin and briefed him on the Vega deaths.

Perez and Ferrera turned up just after 8 a.m. The other two squad members, Baena and Serrano, were out doing a door-to-door. Falcón decided to move on two fronts. He would conduct a house search at the Vega property while Ramírez made a start on Rafael Vega's place of business, interviewing the project managers, the accountant and visiting all the construction sites. They would also have to work on finding the missing gardener, Sergei, and getting more information on the Russians seen by Pablo Ortega on La Noche de Reyes visiting the Vegas' house.

'Where do we look for Sergei?' asked Perez.

'Well, you can find out if there are any Russians or Ukrainians working on Vega's building sites and ask them, for a start. I doubt he's unique.'

'If we want to search Vega's office, from what you've said about Vázquez, we're going to need a warrant.'

'And we won't get one from a judge unless we can prove suspicious circumstances, for which we'll have to wait until we get the autopsies,' said Falcón. 'I'm going to have to take someone from Lucia's family down to the Instituto to identify the bodies. I'll pick them up probably around midday and see if that scrap of photograph we found in the barbecue means anything to any of them.'

'So until then we rely on the kindness of Sr Vázquez?' said Ramirez.

'He's already told me to talk to the accountant and given me his details,' said Falcón, who turned to Ferrera. 'Did you get anything more on those number plates?'

'What plates?' asked Ramirez.

'Somebody followed me home last night in a blue Seat Cordoba.'