Robert Wilson - The Hidden Assassins

Put like that, it didn't seem so bad. Yes, it was a common fear for men facing divorce. And he was no different.

'The usual things,' he said, finally. 'I was worried about my financial situation and my apartment. It was never a serious possibility. Ines was the only woman I'd ever…'

'Were you concerned, as well, that it might affect your social status, and perhaps your job?' asked Zorrita. 'I understand your wife had been very supportive of you after the Maddy Krugman debacle. Your colleagues said she helped you to get your career back on track.'

His colleagues had said that?

'There was never any serious threat to my career,' said Calderon. 'There was no question that I would be appointed as the Juez de Instruccion for something as important as the Seville bombing, for instance.'

'Your lover offered you a solution to the problem, though, didn't she?' said Zorrita.

'What problem?' said Calderon, confused. 'I just said there was no problem with my career, and Marisa-'

'The awkward problem of the divorce.'

Silence. Calderon's memory baffled around his head, like a moth seeking the light.

'"The bourgeois solution to the bourgeois problem",' said Zorrita.

'Oh, you mean that I could kill her,' said Calderon, snorting with derisive laughter. 'That was just a silly joke.'

'Yes, on her part,' said Zorrita. 'But how did it affect your mind? That's the question.'

'It was ridiculous. An absurdity. We both laughed at it.'

'That's what Marisa said, but how did it affect your mind?'

Silence.

'It never, for one moment, entered my mind to kill my wife,' said Calderon. 'And I didn't kill her.'

'When did you first beat your wife, Sr Calderon?'

This interview was like a steeplechase, with the fences getting higher as he progressed around the course. Zorrita watched the internal struggle that he'd seen so many times before: the unacceptable truth, followed by the necessary delusion, and the attempt to construct a lie from those two unreliable sources.

'Had you beaten her before the beginning of this week?' asked Zorrita.

'No,' he said firmly, but instantly realized that it implied some admission of guilt.

'That's cleared something up,' said Zorrita, making a note. 'It was difficult for the Medico Forense to establish the occurrence of the first beating you gave her because, well, as I understand it, old bruising isn't as easy to measure as say…body temperature. Dating old bruising is a difficult business…as is organ rupture and internal bleeding.'

'Look,' said Calderon, inwardly gasping at these shocking revelations, 'I know what you're trying to do.'

'I'd really like to establish a specific time when you first beat Ines. Was it Sunday night or Monday morning?'

'They weren't beatings, they were accidents,' said Calderon, aghast that he'd used the plural now. 'And, whatever the case, it does not mean that I murdered my wife…I didn't.'

'But did the first beating occur on Sunday or Monday?' asked Zorrita. 'Or was it Tuesday? Of course, you used the plural. So it was probably Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and then, finally and tragically, Wednesday, and we'll never be able to attribute what bruise to which day. What time did you get back on Tuesday morning, having spent the night with Marisa?'

'It was around 6.30 a.m.'

'Well, that squares with what Marisa said. And was Ines asleep?'

'I thought she was.'

'But she wasn't,' said Zorrita. 'She woke up, didn't she? And what did she do?'

'All right, she found my digital camera and started downloading the images I had on it. They included two shots of Marisa.'

'You must have been very angry when you found out. When you came across her in the act, caught her red-handed,' said Zorrita, not quite able to ease back on his relish. 'She was very fragile, your wife, wasn't she? The Medico Forense estimates her weight before the catastrophic blood loss as 47 kilos.'

'Look, we were in the kitchen, I just brushed her aside,' said Calderon. 'I didn't realize my own strength or her fragility. She fell awkwardly against the kitchen counter. It's made out of granite.'

'But that doesn't explain the fist mark on her abdomen, or the toe mark over her left kidney, or the amount of her hair we've found distributed around your apartment.'

Calderon sat back. His hands fell from the edge of the table. He was not a career criminal and he was finding resistance very hard work. The only time he could remember having to trump up such a quantity of lies was when he'd been a small boy.

'As I swept her aside I must have tapped her diaphragm. She hit the counter and came down on my foot.'

'The autopsy found a ruptured spleen and a bleeding kidney,' said Zorrita. 'I think it was less of a tap and more of a punch, wasn't it, Sr Calderon? The Medico Forense thinks from the shape of the bruise around her loin area and the darker red imprint of a toenail, that it was more of a kick with a bare foot than someone "falling" on to a foot, which would, of course, be flat on the floor.'

Silence.

'And all that took place on Tuesday morning?'

'Yes,' said Calderon.

'How long was that after your lover's little joke about solving the problem of your divorce?'

'Her joke had nothing to do with that.'

'All right, when was the next time you beat your wife?' asked Zorrita. 'Was it after you found out that your wife and lover had accidentally met in the Murillo Gardens?'

'How the fuck do you know that?' asked Calderon.

'I asked Marisa if she'd ever met your wife,' said Zorrita, 'and she started off by lying to me. Why did she do that, do you think?'

'I don't know.'

'She said she hadn't, but you know, I've been interviewing liars more than half my working life and after a while it's like dealing with children; you become so practised at reading the signs that their attempts become laughable. So why do you think she lied on your behalf?'

'On my behalf?' asked Calderon. 'She didn't do anything on my behalf.'

'Why didn't she want me to know that she had had this…vocal confrontation with your late wife?'

'I've no idea.'

'Because she was still angry about it, Sr Calderon, that's why,' said Zorrita. 'And if she was angry about being insulted by your wife, about being called a whore, in public, by your wife…I'm wondering how she made you feel about it…Well, she told me.'

'She told you?'

'Oh, she tried to protect you again, Sr Calderon. She tried to make it sound like nothing. She kept repeating: "Esteban's not a violent man," that you were just "annoyed", but I think she also realized just how very, very angry you were. What did you do on the night that Marisa told you Ines had called her a whore?'

More silence from Calderon. He'd never found it so difficult to articulate. He was too stoked up with emotion to find the right reply.

'Was that the night you came home and pummelled your wife's breasts and whipped her with your belt so that the buckle cut into her buttocks and thighs?'

He'd come into this interview with a sense of resistance as dense and powerful as a reinforced concrete dam, and within half an hour of questioning all that was left were some cracked and frayed bean canes. And then they caved in. He saw himself in front of a state prosecutor, facing these same questions, and he realized the hopelessness of his situation.

'Yes,' he said, on automatic, unable to find even the schoolboy creativity to invent the ridiculous lie to obscure his brutality. There was nothing ambiguous about the welt of a belt and the gouge of its buckle.

'Why don't you talk me through what happened on the last night of your wife's life,' said Zorrita. 'Earlier we'd reached the moment when you'd just made love to Marisa on the balcony.'

Calderon's eyes found a point midway between himself and Zorrita, which he examined with the unnerving intensity of a man spiralling down to the darker regions of himself. He'd never had these things said to him before. He'd never had these things revealed to him under such emotional circumstances. He was stunned by his brutality and he couldn't understand where, in all his urbanity, it came from. He even tried to imagine himself dealing out these beatings to Ines, but they wouldn't come to him. He did not see himself like that. He did not see Esteban Calderon's fists raining down on his fine-boned wife. It had been him, there was no doubt about that. He saw himself before and after the act. He remembered the anger building up to the beatings and it subsiding afterwards. It struck him that he had been in the grip of a blind savagery, a violence so intense that it had no place in his civilized frame. A terrifying doubt began to crowd his chest and affect the motor reflex of his breathing, so that he had to concentrate: in, out, in, out. And it was there, in the lowest and darkest circle of his spiralling thoughts, the completely lightless zone of his soul, that he realized that he could have murdered her. Javier Falcon had told him once that there was no greater denial than that of a man who had murdered his wife. The thought terrified him into a state of profound concentration. He'd never looked with such microscopic detail into his mind before. He began to talk, but as if he was describing a film, scene by horrible scene.