Robert Wilson - The Hidden Assassins

'I couldn't get anywhere until a buyer from one of these companies got fired. It was she who told me how it worked: you've got to go to church, and you mustn't be a woman. So I qualified on one score, but I hadn't been to church for fifteen years. There were three churches they used: Iglesia de la Magdalena, de Santa Maria La Blanca and San Marcos. I bought myself a black suit and went to church. Within a couple of months I'd been approached.'

'So you got the job, the money, the nice apartment,' said Falcon. 'What went wrong?'

'Almost immediately they started to cut in on my free time. We were sent on courses-sales training and product information. Normal stuff. Except that it was almost every weekend and there was a lot of repetitive company ethos shit and religion, and it wasn't always easy to differentiate between the two. They also did this other thing. They'd partner you off with a senior guy who'd been with the company for two or three years, and he would be your mentor. If you were unlucky and got one of the "serious" ones, they'd fill your head with even more shit. I saw people recruited at the same time as me who just disappeared.'

'Disappeared?'

'Lost their personality. They became an Informaticalidad man, with a glassy look in their eye and their brain tuned to one frequency. It gave me the creeps. That,' said Curado, leaning forward conspiratorially, 'and the total lack of women in the whole sales force. I mean, not one…'

'How did you get along with your mentor?'

'Marco? He was a good guy. I still talk to him occasionally, even though it's forbidden for Informaticalidad men to talk to ex-employees.'

'Why did you leave?'

'Apart from the lack of women and all the brainwashing shit,' said Curado, 'they wouldn't let me into where the big money was being made. Like I said, they sold to companies without having to compete, so you got the good basic salary. But if you wanted to make the big commissions, that was all in converting new prospects to the Informaticalidad way. Once they'd been converted, you got commission on everything that was sold to that company -ever.'

'And how did that work?'

'I never found out. I never got beyond the lowest tier of salesmen. I did not have the right mentality,' he said, tapping his forehead. 'In the end they forced me out through boredom. I was nothing more than a formfiller and a post boy. Taking orders, passing them on to "supply". It was the way they got rid of you at Informaticalidad.'

Falcon took a call from Inspector Jefe Barros.

'I'm on my way to an apartment on Calle Butron,' said Barros. 'You'd better come along as well.'

'I'm in the middle of an interview,' said Falcon, annoyed.

'Ricardo Gamero was late coming back from lunch, so I sent another of my agents round to his apartment. There was no answer. The woman in the apartment below let him in. She said she'd seen Gamero going up, but hadn't seen him leave. The agent called back and I told him to get in there any way he could, which was when the woman started screaming. There's a central patio in the block. She'd opened the window to shout up the well. He was hanging out of his bedroom window.'

Seville-Wednesday, 7th June 2006, 16.30 hrs

Marisa left her apartment. It was hot, easily over forty degrees, and the perfect time for her to work in her studio. Her tight mulatto skin yearned to sweat freely. Out in the street she walked in the sun and breathed in the desert air. The streets were empty. She stumbled on the cobbles of Calle Bustos Tavera until her eyes got used to the sudden shade. She turned up the alleyway to the courtyard. The light at the end was blinding. The sun had sucked out even the edges of the buildings beyond the arch. She shivered a little at the sensation she always had walking down this tunnel.

At the end, where the huge cobbles turned pewtery on the threshold, she stopped. The courtyard should have been empty at this hour. Instinct told her that someone was there. She saw Ines, halfway down the steps leading to the entrance of her studio.

Rage shuddered through her and bunched up behind her flat chest. This fatuous middle-class bitch now wanted to infect the sanctity of her work place with the received opinions of her bourgeois upbringing, with the soulless rant of her consumer needs, with her self-righteous smugness of 'being thin'. Marisa stepped back into the full darkness of the tunnel.

In turning back to go up the stairs to the studio, Ines revealed the lowest welts on the backs of her thighs. These people deserve each other, thought Marisa. They wander through life with total belief in their brilliant control of the reality around them, without ever seeing the iridescence of the illusory bubble in which they float. They might as well be dead.

Marisa suppressed the temptation to run up the steps, beat the wretched woman senseless, throw her down the stairs, break her skull open and discover the smallness within. My God, she hated these people, grown from tradition, sporting their fancy names-Ines Conde de fucking Tejada-surname and title rolled into one.

Ines reached the top of the steps, put her handbag down, tugged open the neck and drew out a blackhandled knife. Now this was interesting. Had the bitch come to kill her? Maybe the skinny-legged cow had some cojones after all. Ines scored something on the front door of the studio, stepped back and jutted her chin at her work. She put the knife back in the bag and walked down the steps. Marisa backed away, snarling, and retreated to her apartment for an hour. By the time she returned the courtyard was empty, the heat more intense. She ran up the stairs to see Ines's message. Scored into the door was the predictable word: PUTA. Whore.

It was time this was over, she thought. She couldn't have the bitch turning up at her place of work. The news of Gamero's suicide had so disconcerted Falcon he'd left Curado with barely another word. Now, as he drove across town, ideas occurred to him and he called Curado on his mobile.

'Have you heard of someone called Ricardo Gamero?'

'Should I?' he asked. 'Was he at Informaticalidad?'

Maybe that had been too lurid an idea.

'I want you to do something for me, David,' said Falcon. 'I want you to call your old friend at Informaticalidad-Marco…?'

'Marco Barreda.'

'I want you to tell Marco Barreda that you had a visit from the Inspector Jefe del Grupo de Homicidios, Javier Falcon. The same cop who's investigating the Seville bombing. I want you to tell him what we discussed in a "thought you'd like to know" sort of way. Nothing sensational, just matter of fact. And tell him what my last question to you was.'

'About Ricardo Gamero?'

'Exactly.'

The Medico Forense was already up the ladder, carrying out his preliminary examination of Ricardo Gamero's body, as Falcon arrived on the crime scene. There was no doubt that he was dead. The CGI agent who'd found him, Paco Molero, had checked for a pulse. Even if Gamero had survived jumping off his window ledge with a rope tied around his neck, he would not have lived for long. On the floor were twelve empty trays of paracetamol. Even if they'd got him to hospital and pumped his stomach, he would probably have remained in a coma and died of liver failure within forty-eight hours. This was not attention seeking. This was an experienced policeman making sure. His apartment had been locked and chained. His bedroom door was also locked, with a chair tilted under the handle.

Falcon shook Inspector Jefe Barros's hand.

'I'm sorry, Ramon. I'm very sorry,' said Falcon, who'd never lost anybody from his squad, but knew that it would be terrible.

Two paramedics manoeuvred the body on to the ladder and pulled it up through the bedroom window. They laid him out on his living-room floor while the forensics went through the bedroom. Falcon asked the instructing judge for permission to search the body.