Robert Wilson: The Hidden Assassins

'What about surgery?'

'There's good news and bad there,' said Pintado. 'He's had surgery, but it was a hernia operation, which is just about the world's most common procedure. His was also the most common type of inguinal hernia, so he has a scar on the right side of his pubis. I'd guess it was about three years old, but I'll get one of the vascular surgeons to come over and confirm that for me. Then we'll take a look at the mesh they used to patch the hernia and hopefully he'll be able to tell me who supplied it, then you can find the hospitals they supply…and, I know, it's going to take a lot of work and time.'

'Maybe he had that done in America as well,' said Falcon.

'Like I said: good news and bad.'

'What about his hair?' asked Falcon. 'They scalped him.'

'He had hair that was at least long enough to cover his collar.'

'How do you get that?'

'He's been on the beach this year,' said Pintado, turning some photographs around for Falcon to look at. 'You can see the tan lines on his arms and legs, but if you turn him over you don't see any tan line at the back of his neck. In fact, if you look, it's quite white compared to the rest of his back, which to me means that it rarely sees the sun.'

'Would you describe him as "white"?' asked Falcon. 'His skin colour didn't look Northern European to me.'

'No. He's olive-skinned.'

'Do you think he was Spanish?'

'Without doing any genetic testing, I would say that he was Mediterranean.'

'Any scars?'

'Nothing significant,' said Pintado. 'He'd sustained a fracture to his skull, but it's years old.'

'Anything interesting about the structure of his body that would give us an idea of what he did?'

'Well, he wasn't a bodybuilder,' said Pintado. 'Spine, shoulder and elbows indicate a deskbound, sedentary life. I'd say that his feet didn't spend much time in shoes. The heels are more splayed than usual, with a lot of hardened skin.'

'As you said, he liked the sun,' said Falcon.

'He also smoked cannabis and I would say he was a regular user, which could be thought of as unusual in someone in his mid forties,' said Pintado. 'Kids smoke dope, but if you're still doing it in your forties it's because it's your milieu…you're an artist, or a musician, or hanging out with that sort of crowd.'

'So he's a desk worker with long hair, who spent time in the sun, not wearing shoes, and smoking dope.'

'A hard-working hippy.'

'They might have been like that in the seventies, but it's not the profile of a modern-day drug smuggler,' said Falcon. 'And potassium cyanide would be an unusual method of execution for people with 9mm handguns in their waistbands.'

The two men sat back from the desk. Falcon flicked through the photographs from the file hoping that something else might jump out at him. He was already thinking about the university and the Bellas Artes, but he didn't want to confine himself at this early stage.

In this momentary silence the two men looked up at each other, as if they were on the brink of the same idea. From beyond the grey walls of the Facultad de Medicina came the unmistakable boom of a significant explosion, not far away. Gloria Alanis was ready for work. By this time she would normally be on her way to her first client meeting, thinking how much, as it receded in the rearview mirror, she hated the drab seventies apartment block where she lived in the barrio of El Cerezo. She was a sales rep for a stationery company but her area of operation was Huelva. On the first Tuesday of every month there was a meeting of the sales team at the head office in Seville, followed by a team-building exercise, a lunch and then a mini-conference to show and discuss new products and promotions.

It meant that for one day during the month, she could put breakfast on the table for her husband and two children. She could also take her eight-year-old daughter, Lourdes, to school, while her husband delivered their three-year-old son, Pedro, to the pre-school which was visible from the back window of their fifth-floor apartment.

On this morning, instead of hating her apartment, she was looking down on the heads of her children and husband and feeling an unusual sensation of warmth and affection early in the week. Her husband sensed this, grabbed her and pulled her on to his lap.

'Fernando,' she said, warning him, in case he tried anything too salacious in front of the children.

'I was thinking,' he whispered in her ear, his lips tickling her lobe.

'It's always dangerous when you start doing that,' she said, smiling at the children, who were now interested. ,'I was thinking there should be more of us,' he whispered. 'Gloria, Fernando, Lourdes, Pedro and…'

'You're crazy,' she said, loving those lips on her ear, saying these things.

'We always talked about having four, didn't we?'

'But that was before we knew how much two cost,' she said. 'Now we work all day and still don't have enough money to get out of this apartment or take a holiday.'

'I have a secret,' he said.

She knew he didn't.

'If it's a lottery ticket, I don't want to see it.'

'It's not a lottery ticket.'

She knew what it was: wild hope.

'My God,' he said, suddenly looking at his watch. 'Hey, Pedro, we've got to get going, man.'

'Tell us the secret,' said the children.

He lifted Gloria up and put her on her feet.

'If I tell you that, it's not a secret any more,' he said. 'You have to wait for the secret to be revealed.'

'Tell us now!'

'This evening,' he said, kissing Lourdes on the head and taking Pedro's tiny hand.

Gloria went to the door with them. She kissed Pedro, who was staring at his feet, and not much interested. She kissed her husband on the mouth and whispered on his lips:

'I hate you.'

'By this evening you'll love me again.'

She went back to the breakfast table and sat opposite Lourdes. There were another fifteen minutes before they had to leave. They spent a few minutes looking at one of Lourdes' drawings before going to the window. Fernando and Pedro appeared below in the car park in front of the pre-school. They waved. Fernando held Pedro above his head and he waved back.

Having delivered the boy to school, Fernando walked off between the apartment blocks to the main road to catch the bus to work. Gloria turned back into the room. Lourdes was already at the table working on another drawing. Gloria sipped her coffee and played with her daughter's silky hair. Fernando and his secrets. He played these games to keep them amused and their hopes up that they would eventually be able to buy their own apartment, but the property prices had exploded and they now knew that they would be renting for the rest of their lives. Gloria was never going to be anything other than a rep and, though Fernando kept saying he was going to take a plumbing course, he still needed to make the money he did as a labourer on the construction site. They'd been lucky to find this apartment with such a cheap rent. They were lucky to have two healthy children. As Fernando said: 'We might not be rich, but we are lucky and luck will serve us better than all the money in the world.'

She didn't immediately associate the shuddering tremor beneath her feet with the booming crash that came from the outside world. It was a noise so loud that her rib cage seemed to clutch at her spine and drive the air out of her lungs. The coffee cup jumped out of her hand and broke on the floor.

'MAMA!' screamed Lourdes, but there was nothing for Gloria to hear, she saw only her daughter's wide-eyed horror and grabbed her.

Terrible things happened simultaneously. Windows shattered. Cracks and giant fissures opened up in the walls. Daylight appeared where it shouldn't. Level horizons tilted. Doorframes folded. Solid concrete flexed. The ceiling crowded the floor. Walls broke in half. Water spurted from nowhere. Electricity crackled and sparked under broken tiles. A wardrobe shot out of sight. Gravity showed them its remorselessness. Mother and daughter were falling. Their small, fragile bodies were hurtling downwards in a miasma of bricks, steel, concrete, wire, tubing, furniture and dust. There was no time for words. There was no sound, because the sound was already so loud it rendered everything else silent. There wasn't even any fear, because it had all become grossly incomprehensible. There was just the sickening plummet, the stunning impact and then a vast blackness, as of a great receding universe. 'What the fuck was that?' said Pintado.