Robert Wilson - The Hidden Assassins

As soon as he was finished, he was rendered mentally and physically drained, like someone coming off a coke high. She managed to steer him to the bed and get his shoes off before he fell into a deep sleep at 1.15 a.m. She stood over him, smoking a cigarette, wondering if she'd be able to wake him in a couple of hours' time.

She washed herself in the bidet, closing her right eye to the smoke rising from the cigarette. She lay on the sofa and let time do what it was good at. At 3 a.m. she started trying to rouse him, but he was completely inert. She held a lighter to his foot. He writhed and kicked out. It took time to get him to come round. He had no idea where he was. She explained that he had to go home, he had an early start, he had to get changed.

At 3.25 she called a taxi. She put his shoes on, got him standing, put his arms into his jacket and called the lift up to her floor. She stood outside with him, his head dropping and jerking off his chest and her shoulder. The taxi arrived just after 3.30. She put him in the back and instructed the driver to take him to Calle San Vicente. She said he was exhausted, that he was the leading judge in the Seville bombing, and that gave the driver a sense of mission. He waved away her € 10 note. For this man it was going to be free. The cab pulled away. Calderon had his head thrown back on the rear shelf. In the yellowish street lighting he looked as he would when dead. The whites of his eyes were just visible below the lids.

At that time of the morning, with Seville as silent as a ghost city, there was no traffic and the cab arrived at Calle San Vicente in just under ten minutes. After much cajoling, the cab driver had to reach in and physically haul Calderon out into the street. He walked him to the front door of the building and asked him for his keys. The driver got the door open and realized he was going to have to go all the way. They crammed themselves into the hall.

'Is there a light?' asked the driver.

Calderon slapped at the wall. Light burst into the hall and the ticking sound of a timer started up. The driver supported him up the stairs.

'This one here,' said Calderon, as they reached the first floor.

The driver opened the apartment door, which was double locked, and returned the keys to Calderon.

'Are you all right now?' he asked, looking into the judge's bleary eyes.

'Yeah, I'm fine now. I'll be OK, thanks,' he said.

'You're doing a great job,' said the driver. 'I saw you on the telly before I started my shift.'

Calderon clapped him on the shoulder. The driver went down the stairs and the light in the hall went out with a loud snap. The cab started up and pulled away. Calderon rolled over the doorjamb into the apartment. The light was on in the kitchen. He shut the door, leaned back on it. Even in his exhausted state, with his eyelids as heavy as lead, his teeth clenched with irritation.

Seville-Thursday, 8th June 2006, 04.07 hrs

Calderon came to with a start that thumped his head into the wall. His face was pressed against the wooden floor. The smell of polish was strong in his nose. His eyelids snapped open. He was instantly wide awake, as if danger was present and near. He was still dressed as he had been all day. He couldn't understand why he was lying in the corridor of his apartment. Had he been so exhausted that he'd slept where he fell? He checked his watch: just gone four o'clock. He'd only been out for ten minutes or so. He was mystified. He remembered coming into the apartment and the light being on in the kitchen. It was still on, but he was beyond it now, further into the flat, which appeared to be completely dark and cold from the air conditioning. He struggled to his feet, checked himself. He wasn't hurt, hadn't even banged his head. He must have slid down the wall.

'Ines?' he said out loud, puzzled by the kitchen light. Calderon stretched his shoulders back. He was stiff. He stepped into the rhomboid of light on the corridor floor. He saw the blood first, a huge, burgeoning crimson pool on the white marble. The colour of it under the bright white light was truly alarming. He stepped back as if expecting an intruder still to be there. He lowered himself and saw her through the chair and table. He knew immediately that she was dead. Her eyes were wide open, with not a scintilla of light in them.

The blood had spread to the right side of the table and underneath it. It was viscous and seemed to be sucking at the chair and table legs. It was so horribly bright that it throbbed in his vision, as if there was still life in it. Calderon crawled on all fours round to the left of the table to where Ines's feet lay, slack and pointed outwards in front of the sink. Her nightie was rucked up. His eyes travelled from her white legs, over her white cotton panties, beyond the waistband-and that was where the bruising started. He hadn't seen it before. He'd had no idea his fists had accomplished such horrifically visible damage. And it was then that he thought he might have seen this before after all, because his whole body was suddenly consumed with a remembered panic that seemed to constrict his throat and cut off the blood supply to his brain. He reared back on his knees and held his head.

He crawled back out of the kitchen and got to his feet in the corridor. He went swiftly out of the apartment, which required him to unlock the door. He hit the stair light, looked around and went back in. The light was still on in the kitchen. Ines was still lying there. The blood was now one floor tile's width from the wooden floor of the corridor. He pressed the balls of his palms into his eye sockets and ripped them away, but it made no difference to the horror of what lay before him. He dropped to all fours again.

'You fucking bitch, you stupid fucking bitch,' he said. 'Look what the fuck you've gone and done now.'

The noisily bright blood resounded in the hard kitchen. It was also moving, consuming the white marble, reaching towards him. He went back around the table. The ghastly purple of the contusions seemed to have deepened in colour in the interim, or his constant toing and froing in and out of the light was playing tricks. Between her splayed thighs he now saw the welts from his belt lashing. He sank to his knees again, pressed his fists into his eyes and started sobbing. This was it. This was the end. He was finished, finished, finished. Even the most incompetent state judge couldn't fail to make a watertight case against him. A wife-beater who'd gone a step too far. A wife-beater who'd just come back from fucking his mistress, had another confrontation and this time…Oh, yes, it might have been an accident. Was it an accident? It probably was. But this time he'd overdone it and she'd smashed her stupid head open. He pounded the table.

It cleared as suddenly as it had arrived. Calderon sank back on his heels and realized that the terrible panic had gone. His mind was back on track. At least, he felt it was back on track. What he hadn't realized was the nature of the damage done by the panic, the way it had opened up electronic pathways to the flaws in his character. As far as Calderon was concerned, his mind was back to the steel-trap clarity of the leading judge in Seville, and it came to him that, with no chest freezer, the only solution was to get her out of the apartment, and he had to do it now. There was just over an hour before dawn.

Weight was not the problem. Ines was currently 48 kilos. Her height at 1.72m was more of a difficulty. He stormed around the table and into the spare room, where the luggage was kept. He pulled out the biggest suitcase he could find, a huge grey Samsonite with four wheels. He grabbed two white towels from the cupboard.

One of the towels he laid across the kitchen doorway to stop the blood from seeping into the corridor. The other he wrapped around Ines's head. It nearly made him sick. The back of her head was a flat mush and the blood soaked gratefully into the towel, consuming the whiteness with its incarnadine stain. He found a bin liner and pulled it over her head, securing it with cooking string. He washed his hands. He put the case on the table, picked Ines up and laid her in it. She was far too big. Even foetally she didn't fit. He couldn't cram her feet in and, even if he could, her shoulders were too broad for the case to shut. He looked down on her with his considerable intellect surging forward, but fatally, in the wrong direction.