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

'Good night, Javier,' she said, as he walked down the stairs. 'And remember: the important thing is that you're a good man.'

Falcón left the coolness of her consulting room and stepped into the thick heat in the street. He walked and did what Alicia had told him not to do. He dwelt on that photograph of Inés pinned to his board. Without thinking, he crossed a road and found himself in front of the Old Tobacco Factory, which had now been incorporated into the university. He'd overshot the Edificio de los Juzgados where he'd parked the car. He crossed Avenida del Cid and backtracked through the walkways of the Palacio de Justicia. Someone called his name. The sound of the voice was like a woman's hands coming up his chest from behind. The skipping heels on the pavement told him before he'd turned that he was going to see Inés.

'Congratulations,' he said, his lips fluffing the word.

She looked blank as they kissed hello.

'Esteban told me yesterday,' said Falcón.

She put her hand to her mouth as if that would obscure her memory struggle and then rolled her eyes.

'I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking,' she said. 'Thank you, Javier.'

'I'm very happy for you,' he said. 'Isn't it a bit late for you to be working?'

'Esteban told me to meet him here at 9.30. Have you seen him today?' she asked.

'He postponed our meeting until tomorrow.'

'He's always here at this time of night. I don't know what could…'

'What did the security guard say?'

'That he left at six and hasn't been back.'

'You've tried his mobile?'

'It's switched off. He switches it off all the time now. Too many people want to talk to him,' she said.

'Well… can I give you a lift somewhere?'

Inés left a message with the security guard and they got into Falcón's car. They drove down Cristobal Colón and agreed to have a tapa in El Cairo on Reyes Catolicos.

They sat at the bar and ordered beers and a tapa of piquillo peppers stuffed with hake. He asked her about the wedding. She spoke with her mind only half on the job, looking at every face that walked by the window. Falcón sipped his beer and murmured encouragement until she turned on him and gripped his knee with her long white manicured nails.

'Has he been all right?' she asked. 'You know… in his work.'

'I don't know. I've been working this case with him out in Santa Clara, but only since yesterday.'

'Santa Clara?'

'At the end of Avenida de Kansas City.'

'I know where Santa Clara is,' she said, annoyed, but her irritation instantly broke and she was staring at him with her big brown eyes in the way that she did when she wanted something. 'He said… he said…'

'What, Inés?'

'Nothing,' she said, and released his knee. 'He seems a little anxious recently.'

'Only because he's made it official now: the announcement.'

'What difference does that make?' she said, hanging on Falcón's every syllable, desperate for insight into the male psyche.

'You know… total commitment… no going back.'

'He was committed before.'

'It's official… confirmed to the world. It can make a man nervous, that sort of thing. You know, The End of Youth. No more playing around. Family. Adult responsibilities – all that stuff.'

'I see,' she said, not seeing it at all. 'You mean there's doubt?'

'No, no, no que no,' said Falcón. 'There's no doubt, just a nervousness at the prospect of change. He's thirty-seven, never been married before. It's just a reaction to the future physical and emotional upheaval.'

'Physical?' she said, sitting on the edge of her seat.

'You're not going to stay in his apartment, are you?' said Falcón. 'You'll get a house… start a family.'

'Did Esteban talk to you about this?' she said, searching his face for the least sign of a tic.

'I'm the last person…'

'We'd always said that we'd buy a place in the centre of town,' she said. 'We wanted to be in the old city in a big house like yours… maybe not so mad and enormous, but in that classic style. I've been looking for months… mostly at old properties that need work, and guess what Esteban said last night?'

'That he's found somewhere?' said Falcón, unable to stop the thought flashing through his mind that Inés had only married him for his house.

'That he wants to live in Santa Clara.'

Falcón stared into those big frightened eyes and felt something like slow-motion wreckage forming in his mind. Consonants caught in his throat like fish bones.

'Exactly,' she said, leaning back, almost in triumph, 'it's the antithesis of what we'd always talked about.'

Falcón drained his beer, ordered more, stuffed the pepper into his mouth messily.

'What does it mean, Javier?'

'It means,' he said, hurtling towards tragic revelations and veering off at the last moment, 'it means that it's part of the emotional upheaval. When everything in your life changes at once… you change with it… but more slowly. I know. I've become an expert in these matters of change.'

She nodded, gulping the words down into her chest where she could treasure them until her eyes flickered and she shot off the bar stool and leapt at the door.

'Esteban!' she roared down the street, better than any fishwife.

Calderón stopped as if he'd been knifed in the chest. He turned and Falcón expected to see the hilt jutting out of his ribs, but instead he saw – in the moments before Calderón could compose his face – fear, loss, contempt and a strange wildness, as if the man had been lost for days in the mountains. Then the judge smiled and the radiance shone out of him. She went to him. He went to her. They kissed madly in the street. An old couple sitting in the window nodded their approval. Falcón blinked at the fraudulence on display.

Inés hauled him into the bar. Calderón's step faltered as he saw Falcón perched on his bar stool. The three of them explained everything to each other twice without listening to a word. Beers shot down throats. Topics came and went. Inés and Calderón left after minutes. Falcón studied the sinew standing out of Inés's forearm as she gripped her fiancé’s shirt. It was desperate. She was never letting go of this one.

The bill came. He paid it and drove home. Every light turned to red. The cobbles jolted his insides. Despite his tiredness he had no patience for bed. He went to his study and booted up the computer. He went through all the shots he'd taken since the weekend. He kept looking at the snap of Inés, seeing if it fitted with any of the others, seeing if he could remember it. It didn't help. He found the whisky, poured himself a single glass and left the bottle in the kitchen.

He was about to shut the computer down when he remembered Maddy Krugman telling him that she'd read his story on the internet. He logged on and entered her name into a search engine. There were several thousand hits, mostly for a political commentator called John Krugman and a journalist for the New York Times called Paul Krugman. Falcón entered Madeleine Coren into the search engine. There were only three hundred hits and he quite quickly started to find references to her photographic work. They were mainly old articles and a few reviews of her exhibitions, but they always featured a shot of the stunningly beautiful young Madeleine Coren, who looked cool, unapproachable and dressed exclusively in black. He was butting up against his boredom when a small piece from the St Louis Times caught his eye. FBI murder inquiry: Madeleine Coren, photographer, has been helping the FBI with their inquiries into the murder of Iranian-born carpet dealer Reza Sangari. The article appeared under the local news section and was dated 15th October 2000.

Madeleine Coren in FBI Murder Inquiry

The New York photographer Maddy Coren has been helping the FBI with their murder inquiry following the discovery of Reza Sangari's bludgeoned body in his Lower East Side apartment.