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

'Words?' asked Falcón.

'He'd kill him,' said Ramírez. 'I know that guy. He would not let anybody live with that kind of hold over him.'

Silence again. Cristina Ferrera looked up to find both men's eyes fixed on her.

'You're not serious, are you?' she said.

'And then I could arrest him for murder,' said Ramírez.

'I can't believe you're even asking me to contemplate thinking about such a thing,' said Ferrera. 'If you are serious, you don't need a moral guide, you need a full transplant.'

Falcón laughed. Ramírez joined in with a loud guffaw. Relief spread across Ferrera's face from the small nose outwards.

'Well, nobody can say we didn't consider every possibility,' said Falcón.

'I'm going back to the computer,' she said and left, closing the door behind her.

'Were you being serious?' asked Ramírez, leaning over the desk.

Falcón didn't move a muscle in his face.

'Joder,' said Ramírez. 'That would have been something.'

The phone rang very loudly, startling both men. Falcón snatched it to his ear. He listened carefully while Ramírez rolled an unlit cigarette in his fingers.

'You've made a very courageous decision, Sr Lopez,' said Falcón, and put the phone down.

'Some good news at last?' said Ramírez, putting the cigarette into his mouth.

'That was the father of the boy who was supposedly abused by Sebastián Ortega. The boy, Manolo, is on his way back to Seville now. He's going to come straight to the Jefatura and give a revised and completely true account of what happened.'

'That's not going to be much of a wedding present for Juez Calderón.'

'But you know what that means, don't you, José Luis?'

The unlit cigarette dropped into Ramírez's lap.

The phone rang again. This time it was Juez Calderón, confirming that he now had a signed search warrant for Vega's safe-deposit box, held in the name of Emilio Cruz at the Banco Banesto. Falcón picked up the box key and the two men left for the Edificio de los Juzgados. On the way out he told Ferrera that Manolo Lopez was going to arrive with his mother to make a revised video statement and that he wanted her to read the Ortega file, prepare the questions, and interview him.

They drove to the Edificio de los Juzgados. Calderón's secretary gave Ramírez the search warrant. They continued to the Banco Banesto and asked to see the manager. They showed their IDs and the warrant and were taken down into the vault. Falcón signed himself in and the manager accompanied them to the boxes. She inserted her key, turned it once and left them to it. Falcón used his key and they pulled out the stainless steel-covered box, which they put on a table in the middle of the room.

On top of the papers in the box was an old Spanish passport and some travel tickets. The passport was issued in 1984 and the photograph was of Rafael Vega, but it was in the name of Oscar Marcos. The tickets were held together by a paper clip and they were in date order. The first trip was from Seville to Madrid on 15th January 1986 and then back to Seville on 19th January. The next trip took place on 15th February 1986 and was by train from Seville to Madrid to Barcelona and finally Paris. On 17th February there was a train ticket from Paris to Frankfurt and on to Hamburg. On 19th February he went from there to Copenhagen and on 24th February he crossed into Sweden and went up to Stockholm. The return trip started on 1st March and was from Oslo to London by air. Three days were spent in London and then he flew to Madrid and took the train to Seville.

'This stuff,' said Ramírez, who was going through the papers underneath, 'must be in code, because they read like a child's letters to his father.'

Falcón called Virgilio Guzmán and asked him if he could come to his house on Calle Bailén immediately. They emptied the safe-deposit box and put the contents into a large evidence bag. Falcón told the manager the box was now empty, gave her a receipt and returned the key. They drove to Calle Bailén and Falcón read the letters while they waited for Virgilio Guzmán. Each letter had its envelope clipped to it. They were all posted from America to the postbox address in the name of Emilio Cruz. The letters made sense individually but not as a whole.

Guzmán arrived. He sat at the desk with the papers. He looked through the passport and then checked through the travel tickets.

'End of February 1986, Stockholm, Sweden,' he said. 'Do you know what happened then?'

'No idea.'

'On 28th February 1986 the Prime Minister, Olaf Palme, was shot as he came out of the cinema with his wife,' said Guzmán. 'The assassin was never found.'

'What about all those letters?' asked Ramírez.

'I've got somebody who can help me with decoding them, but I imagine they were his instructions for one last operation for his old friend Manuel Contreras,' said Guzmán. 'He had the perfect cover. He was fully trained. It was the kind of thing they did in Operation Condor all the time. No possible trail back to the Pinochet regime, and one painful thorn is finally removed from the President's hide. It's perfect.'

'So why would he keep all this stuff?'

'I don't know, except that killing the Prime Minister of a European country is no small thing and perhaps he might have felt the need for a bit of security in case things changed later on.'

'Like now?' said Falcón. 'The Pinochet regime is finished…'

'Manuel Contreras is in jail, having been betrayed by his old friend the General,' said Guzmán.

'And Vega thinks it's time to even the score. Show what the Pinochet regime was capable of?' said Falcón. 'It's the strategy of no return. You might put Pinochet away, but you finish yourself as well.'

'And that's what he did,' said Guzmán. 'He died with that note in his hand. You did what he wanted you to do. By investigating the crime you found his safe-deposit box key and now his secret will be revealed to the world.'

They photocopied all the letters from the safe-deposit box and Guzmán took them off to his code-breaking friend who, he revealed, was an ex-DINA man now living in Madrid.

'Know thine enemy,' said Guzmán, explaining the relationship. 'I'll scan these into the computer, e-mail them up to him and he'll read them like a book. I'll have an answer for you by this afternoon.'

Falcón and Ramírez returned to the Jefatura in time to meet Sra Lopez and Manolo, who was already at work on his video interview and enjoying Cristina Ferrera's company. By one o'clock the boy had finished and Falcón called Alicia Aguado. He played the statement to her over the phone and she agreed to put it to Sebastián Ortega.

Ferrera took a patrol car to the Poligono San Pablo to find Salvador Ortega, while Falcón drove Alicia Aguado to the prison. They showed Sebastián Manolo's video interview and he broke down. He then wrote his own fifteen-page statement detailing five years of abuse at the hands of Ignacio Ortega. Ferrera called to say that Salvador was now at the Jefatura. Falcón faxed Sebastián's statement through for Salvador to read. Salvador asked for a meeting with Sebastián.

Ferrera drove him out to the prison and he and Sebastián talked for over two hours, after which Salvador agreed to write his own statement. He also gave Falcón a list of seven names of other children, now adults, who'd suffered at his father's hands.

At five o'clock Falcón was eating a chorizo bocadillo and drinking a non-alcoholic beer when Virgilio Guzmán called, saying that he'd had the letters decoded and he wanted to e-mail him the translations. They proved to be a series of instructions to Vega. Where and when to go and pick up his passport in Madrid. The route he should take to Stockholm. Intelligence on the movements and non-existent security of Olaf Palme. Where to go in Stockholm to pick up the weapon. Where to dispose of the weapon after the hit, and finally his return route to Seville.