Robert Wilson: The Ignoranceof Blood

They went downstairs and out into the heat. The sun was just up, the sea was blue, there was barely any movement, just birds. They got into the car and drove down the hill.

Ten minutes later they were in the club, sitting in Vasili Lukyanov's office, but with Leonid Revnik behind the desk smoking an H. Upmann Coronas Junior cigar. He had short grey hair, cut en brosse with a sharp widow's peak, big shoulders and chest under a very expensive white shirt from Jermyn Street.

'Did you speak to him last night?' asked Revnik.

'To Vasili? Yes, I got through eventually,' said Alexei.

'Where was he?'

'On the road to Seville. I don't know where.'

'What did he have to say?' asked Revnik.

'That Yuri Donstov had made him an offer that you wouldn't have given him in a million years.'

'He's right there,' said Revnik. 'What else?'

Alexei shrugged. Revnik glanced up. A hard fist clubbed Alexei in the side of the head, knocked him and the chair over.

'What else?' said Revnik.

They hefted Alexei and the chair back to vertical. A lump was already up on the side of his face.

'"What the fuck,"' said Alexei. 'He had an accident.'

That had Revnik's attention.

'Tell me.'

'We were talking and he suddenly said: "What the fuck is this…" then BANG! and the sound of tyres screeching, a thump, a crash and then it all went dead.'

Revnik hit the desk.

'Why the fuck didn't you tell us that last night?'

'I was drunk. I passed out.'

'You know what that means?' said Revnik to no one in particular, but pointing across the room. 'It means that what was in there is now in the hands of the police.'

They looked at the empty safe.

'Take him away,' said Revnik.

They took him back out to the car, drove up into the hills. The smell of pine was very strong after the cool of the night. They walked him into the trees and the ex-KGB man finally got to use his Stechkin APS.

Outside Seville – Friday, 15th September 2006, 08.30 hrs

The sun had been up for twenty-five minutes over the flat fields of the fertile flood plain of the Guadalquivir river. It was close to 30°C when Falcon drove back into the city at 8.30 a.m. At home he lay on his bed fully clothed in the air-con and tried to get some sleep. It was hopeless. He drank another coffee before heading into the office.

The short drive took him down by the river, past the spearhead railings and gates to the Maestranza bullring, whose whitewashed facade, smooth and brilliant as the icing of a cake, had its porthole windows and dark red doors and shutters piped with ochre. The high phoenix palms near the Toro de Oro sagged against the already bleached sky and as he crossed the San Telmo bridge the slow water was almost green and had no autumnal sparkle.

The emptiness of the Plaza de Cuba and the shopping streets leading off it was a reminder that it was still a summer heat beating down on the bludgeoned city. Sevillanos had returned from their August holidays to find their new vitality sapped by suffocating apartments, drained by power cuts and the old city centre crammed with hot, unbreathable air. The end-of-summer storms, which scrubbed the cobbles clean, hosed down the grateful trees, rinsed the uninspired atmosphere and brought colour back to the faded sky, had not arrived. With no respite since May, ladies' fans no longer opened with the customary snap and their wrists trembled with a fluttering palsy at the thought of another month of endless palpitations.

Nobody in the office at 10.15 a.m. The paperwork from the 6th June Seville bombing still stacked knee-high around his desk. The court case against the two remaining suspects was going to take months, possibly years, to construct and there was no guarantee of success. The wall chart pinned up opposite Falcon's desk with all its names and links said it all – there was a gap in what the media were calling the Catholic Conspiracy, or rather, not so much a gap as a dead end.

Every time he sat at his desk the same five facts presented themselves to him: * 1) Although the two suspects they had in custody had been successfully linked to the two ringleaders of the plot – all four were right-wing and staunch Catholics, hence the name of the conspiracy – neither of them had any idea who'd planted the bomb, which on 6th June had destroyed an apartment building and a nearby pre-school in a residential area of Seville. * 2) The ringleaders themselves, Lucrecio Arenas and Cesar Benito, had been murdered before they could be arrested. The former had been shot just as he was about to dive into his swimming pool in Marbella and the latter had had his throat so brutally chopped with the blade of a hand that he'd choked to death in his hotel room in Madrid. * 3) Over the last three months a plethora of agencies, at the behest of the board of directors, had gone through the offices of the Banco Omni in Madrid, where Lucrecio Arenas had been the Chief Executive Officer. They'd interviewed all his old colleagues and business contacts, searched his properties and grilled his family, but had found nothing. * 4) They'd also gone through the Horizonte Group's building in Barcelona where Cesar Benito had been an architect and board director of the construction division. They'd searched his apartments, houses in the Costa del Sol and studio, and interviewed everybody he'd ever known and likewise found nothing. * 5) They had tried to gain access to the I4IT (Europe) building in Madrid. This company was the European arm of an American-based investment group run by two born-again Christians from Cleveland, Ohio. They were the ultimate owners of Horizonte and, through a team of highly paid lawyers, had successfully blocked all investigations, arguing that the police had no right to enter their offices.

Every time Falcon threw himself into his chair he faced that chart and the hard brick wall behind it.

The world had moved on, as it always did, even after New York, Madrid and London, but Falcon had to mark time, wandering aimlessly in the maze of passages that the conspiracy had become. As always, he was haunted by the promise he'd made to the people of Seville in a live broadcast on 10th June: that he would find the perpetrators of the Seville bombing, even if it took him the rest of his career. That was what he faced, although he would never admit it to Comisario Elvira, when he woke up alone in the dark. He had penetrated the conspiracy, gained access to the dark castle, but it had rewarded him with nothing. Now he was reduced to hoping for 'the secret door' or 'the hidden passage' which would take him to what he could not see.

What he had noticed was that the one person, over these three long months, who was never far from his thoughts was the disgraced judge, Esteban Calderon, and, by association, the judge's girlfriend, a Cuban wood sculptor called Marisa Moreno.

'Inspector Jefe?'

Falcon looked up from the dark pit of his mind to find the wide-open face of one of his best young detectives, the ex-nun, Cristina Ferrera. There was nothing very particular about Cristina that made her attractive – the small nose, the big smile, the short, straight, dull blonde hair didn't do it. But what she had on the inside – a big heart, unshakeable moral beliefs and an extraordinary empathy – had a way of appearing on the outside. And it was that which Falcon had found so appealing during their first interview for the job she now held.

'I thought you were in here,' she said, 'but you didn't answer. Up early?'

'A colourful Russian got killed by a flying steel rod on the motorway,' said Falcon. 'Have you got anything for me?'

'Two weeks ago you asked me to look into the life of Juez Calderon's girlfriend, Marisa Moreno, to see if there was any dirt attached,' said Ferrera.