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

for it to kill a grown man in good health. This product killed him in less than quarter of an hour because it had been powerfully boosted with hydrochloric acid.'

'How easy is that to get hold of?'

'Any hardware store would sell it to you under the name of muriatic acid. It's used for cleaning cement off paving stones, for instance.'

'We'll check his garage,' said Falcón, making a note. 'There's no going back once you've ingested something that strong?'

'Irreparable damage would be done to the throat, digestive tract and, in this case, the lungs as well.'

'How did it get into the lungs?'

'It's very difficult to tell what damage was caused by force or violence and what was caused by the corrosiveness of the liquid. I would say that he, or someone else, had rammed the bottle down his throat. Under those circumstances some of the liquid would inevitably find its way into the lungs. There's evidence of corrosive action in the nasal passages, so product was being coughed up. With the mouth occupied by the bottle the only way out was via the nose.'

'You seem to think he could have accomplished this on his own.'

'I have to say that's doubtful.'

'But not impossible?'

'If you were going to kill yourself in this horrible way I imagine that you would try and put yourself beyond rescue by making sure you ingested as much of the product as possible in the first moments. I think there would be a certain amount of nervousness involved, too… and that would cause you to ram the neck of the bottle down your throat. That of course would also set off the gagging mechanism. I think it would be a messy business, unless there was someone holding the bottle in place and holding the victim steady as well.'

'The floor was clean apart from some droplets close to the neck of the bottle.'

'There was spotting on his chest and clothes, but nothing like the quantities you'd expect if he gagged and spurted it out all over.'

'Any evidence of holding – marks on arms, wrist, neck, head?'

'Nothing on the wrists. There are burn marks on the arms in the crooks of his elbows, but the dressing gown had slipped down and it's possible that happened as he writhed in agony on the floor. There are marks on the head and neck, and claw marks on the throat. I would say they are self-inflicted. He had product on his hands. But the marks could just as easily have been made by someone holding him in a kind of neck lock.'

'You know what I'm trying to do here, Doctor,' said Falcón. 'I've got to go back to Juez Calderón and show him conclusive proof that someone else was in the room with Sr Vega, who was responsible for his death. If I can't do that there may well be no murder inquiry. Now, if I'm not mistaken, you think, like me and the forensics, that it was probably murder.'

'But conclusive proof of another party's presence is more difficult,' said the Médico Forense.

'Is there anything that would link Sr Vega to the death of his wife?'

'I didn't find anything. Sr Vega had only his own tissue under his fingernails from clawing at his throat.'

'Anything else?'

'What's the psychological profile of the victims?'

'She was suffering from mental illness,' said Falcón. 'He doesn't seem to have been suicidal, but there are questionable aspects to his mental state.'

Falcón gave a brief resume of what he'd been told by Dr Rodríguez and how disturbed Vega had been since the beginning of the year.

'I see what you mean,' said the Médico Forense. 'This could go either way.'

'To balance that, the victim had a 9mm handgun, a surveillance system he didn't use and bulletproof windows.'

'Expecting trouble.'

'Or just a nervous, wealthy person close to the Poligono San Pablo.'

'And the unused surveillance system?'

'Nerves again,' said Falcón. 'Maybe his mentally ill wife was paranoid. She showed off to her neighbours about the windows. Or possibly Vega himself wanted to discourage outsiders but not leave a record of people who came to the house.'

'Because he's involved in something criminal?'

'A neighbour saw some Russian visitors who didn't look like they'd come from the Bolshoi.'

'There's plenty of talk about the Russian mafia these days, especially down on the Costa del Sol, but I didn't know they'd reached Seville,' said the Médico Forense.

'This is a nasty way to die, isn't it, Doctor?'

'Revenge or punishment, maybe an example to others. What about his sex life?'

'His father-in-law says he was reluctant to perform his marital duties… ever, even before his wife got depressed. The mother-in-law reckoned he was having an affair which went wrong, which was why he'd been so withdrawn since the beginning of the year,' said Falcón. 'Is there anything else I should know?'

'Just one curious thing. He's had some cosmetic surgery done to his eyes and neck. Nothing extraordinary, just bags removed from under the eyes, and skin removed from the neck to tighten up and reveal the jawline.'

'Everybody's having cosmetic surgery these days.'

'That's true, and this is the curious thing. The work is pretty old. Difficult to say exactly how old, but more than ten years.'

Thursday, 25th July 2002

On the way back to the Jefatura Falcón drove while Ferrera read the autopsy reports. It was lunch time, the temperature had now reached 45°C. There was no one on the streets. Cars bulldozed the heat down the shimmering tarmac. When they arrived at the Jefatura he told Ferrera to leave the reports on Ramírez's desk and they would reconvene at 6 p.m.

The heat had broken Falcón's appetite. At home he managed a bowl of gazpacho, of which Encarnación made a daily supply. He could not find the energy, with the heat crammed into every corner of the house, to look through the Jiménez photographs he'd brought in from the car. He went upstairs, stripped and showered and collapsed into the air-conditioned cool of his bedroom. His brain wavered and released images of the day. He lurched into sleep and a recurring dream where he entered a public toilet which was pristine until he flushed it, whereupon it started filling up with sickening quantities of shit until it overflowed. He found himself trapped and had to climb the walls of the cubicle, only to find all the other toilets were doing the same thing so that he felt a rush of nausea followed by a deep animal panic. He woke up, his hair full of sweat and his mind inexplicably latched on to Pablo Ortega until he remembered the actor's cesspit problem.

It was 5.30 p.m. The shower drilled the muck out of his hair and head. His mind tripped forwards and backwards under the pummelling water. He knew why he had dreamt the dream – another investigation, his own past and the past of others all rucked up by the tragedy. What he was unprepared for was his mind's next leap, which told him that he should go and visit Pablo Ortega's son, Sebastián, in prison. This would be nothing to do with his investigation, just a separate mission. The idea made him feel good. Something creaked open in his chest. He felt more able to breathe.

He took the Jiménez photographs into the study and pulled out the shots of Pablo Ortega. There was one of Pablo smiling and talking to two men. One of these men was obscured by people in the foreground and the other man he did not know. He took the photo with him, put it on the passenger seat.

Ramírez was typing up his report on his interviews in Vega's offices and the latest on the search for Sergei. Falcón told him about the passport in the name of Emilio Cruz and the key. Ramírez took down the details.

'I'll e-mail this to the Argentinean Embassy in Madrid, see what they make of it,' said Ramírez. 'And I'll put a trace right back to the original issuing office on Rafael Vega's ID.'