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

'Can we get something on that before the weekend?'

'Not in July, but we can try.'

'Any news on Sergei?'

'He was seen some time in the last couple of weeks in a bar on Calle Alvar Nunez Caleza de Vaca with a woman who was not Spanish and talked the same language as him. The woman had been seen there before and the barman thought she came from the Poligono San Pablo. He also thought she was a hooker. We've got a full description and Serrano and Baena are working with it now.'

Falcón listened to his messages, staring at the photograph he'd brought up from the car. Calderón had postponed their meeting until the following morning. He put a call through to Inspector Jefe Alberto Montes from GRUME (Grupo de Menores), who was responsible for crimes against children, and asked if he could pass by for an informal chat. Ferrera arrived as he was leaving and he told her to work on the phone numbers listed beside calls in and out of the Vegas' house and Rafael Vega's mobile, and then join Serrano and Baena looking for the woman seen with Sergei.

'What about the key we found with the passport in Vega's house?'

'Sergei is more important at this stage. We need a witness,' said Falcón. 'Work on the key if you have time. Start with the banks.'

On the way up to Montes's office he dropped in on Felipe and Jorge in the lab. He talked them through the autopsies. They looked dismal. They had nothing to offer from the crime scene. The pillow had been clean of any sweat or saliva. The only curious thing they'd come across was to do with the note in Vega's hand.

'As his lawyer said, it's clearly his own handwriting, but we thought it interesting that he should describe it as "careful" so I looked at it under the microscope,' said Felipe. 'It's traced over.'

'What do you mean?'

'He'd written it before, which left an indent on the page beneath, then he'd gone back to the pad and traced over the indent… as if he wanted to see what had been written.'

'But he'd written it in the first place?' said Falcón.

'I can only tell you the facts,' said Felipe.

Alberto Montes was in his early fifties, overweight, with bags under his eyes and a nose that had exploded from excessive drinking. He'd undergone a psychological assessment at the end of last year because of the drinking problem and had somehow got through it. He was looking at early retirement now and seemed anxious to get there. He had been with the Grupo de Libertad Sexual, which investigated adult sex crimes, and GRUME for over fifteen years and held an encyclopaedic knowledge of names and the horrors attached to them. He sat turned away from his desk, looking out of his second-floor window, smoking and presumably thinking of future freedom. He strained water from a plastic cup through his thick moustache as if he was wishing it was whisky. As Falcón reached his desk he swivelled in his chair and refilled the plastic cup.

'Kidney stones, Inspector Jefe,' he said. 'They get me every summer. I've been told to drink six litres of water a day. What can I do for you?'

'Eduardo Carvajal,' said Falcón. 'Remember him?'

'He's burnt on my heart, that guy. He was going to make me famous,' said Montes. 'Why has his name suddenly reappeared?'

'I'm investigating the deaths of Rafael and Lucia Vega.'

'Rafael Vega… the constructor?' said Montes.

'Do you know him?'

'I don't get invited to his caseta in the Feria, but I know who he is,' said Montes. 'Did somebody kill him?'

'That's what we're trying to find out. While I was going through his address book I came across Carvajal and it was a name that rang bells from that case I investigated last year – he was known to, and a friend of, Raúl Jiménez. I didn't have time to dig him up then so I thought I'd try now,' said Falcón. 'How was he going to make you famous?'

'He said he was going to give me all the names of everybody who'd been a part of his paedophile ring… ever. He promised me the biggest coup of my career. Politicians, actors, lawyers, councillors, businessmen. He said he would bring me the golden key which would open up high society and reveal it for the rotten, stinking egg it really was. And I believed him. I genuinely thought he was going to come through with the information.'

'But he died in a car crash before he could deliver.'

'Well, he came off the road,' said Montes. 'It was late at night, there was alcohol in his system and it was a very tricky series of bends from Ronda to San Pedro de Alcántara… but we'll never know.'

'What does that mean?'

'All this is pretty well known, Inspector Jefe. By the time I'd been notified, he'd been buried and the car was a block in a breaker's yard about that big -' said Montes, holding his hands fifty centimetres apart.

'But some people were convicted, weren't they?'

Montes held up four fat fingers with a cigarette burning amongst them.

'And they couldn't help you in the same way that Carvajal could?'

'They only knew each other. They were one cell in the ring,' said Montes. 'They're careful, these people. It's no different to a terrorist outfit or a resistance movement.'

'How did you get to them in the first place?'

'I'm ashamed to have to tell you it was through the FBI,' said Montes. 'We can't even crack our own paedophile rings.'

'So it was international?'

'That's the internet for you,' said Montes. 'The FBI were running a sting operation. They found a couple in Idaho who were managing a child porn site and they took it over. They picked up addresses from all over the world and informed the local authorities in each country. It's good to know that there are a lot of scared paedophiles out there, but I don't think we'll pull in any of the people that Carvajal knew. I'm sure that's all finished.'

'Why?'

'Carvajal was the key man. He was procuring. They knew him. He knew them. But they didn't know each other. There's nothing to hold it together.'

'But what was Carvajal doing out of custody on his own?'

'That was part of the deal negotiated with his lawyer. He was going to pull all the different cells together and we were going to scoop the lot in a series of raids.'

'Did you find out how he was procuring?'

'Not that it did us much good,' said Montes, nodding.

'It was something that was just starting then. The Russian mafia involvement in people trafficking. Prostitution became a big thing for them because they could control the supply. To control the drugs trade they had to fight for territory because they didn't have home-grown heroin or cocaine, but with prostitution they had the goods from the word go. And what's more they found that it was less dangerous and just as lucrative. There was a Romanian girl in here last week who'd been bought and sold seven times. Believe me, Inspector Jefe, we've come full circle and we're back in the slave-trade era.'

'Do you mind just giving me a little resume about that?'

'The ex-Soviet states are full of people. A lot of them are able and intelligent – university lecturers, technical college instructors, builders, public servants – but hardly any of them can make a living in the post Soviet era. They're trying to live off fifteen to twenty euros a month. We in Europe, and especially in countries like Italy and Spain, don't have enough people. I've read reports saying that Spain needs an extra quarter of a million people a year just to keep the country functioning and pay taxes so that the state has money to give me a pension. Supply-and-demand economies are the easiest to understand and are immediately exploited.

'You need a visa to get into Europe. I've heard a lot of Ukrainians cross the border into Poland and get their visas from the embassies in Warsaw. Portugal offers visas quite easily. Spain, because of our Moroccan problem, is more difficult, but it's easy enough to enrol in a language school or something like that. Of course, you need help to do this. This is where the mafia steps in. They will facilitate your journey. They will get you a visa. They will arrange transport. They will charge you a minimum of a thousand dollars per head… I can see you're thinking, Inspector Jefe.'