Robert Wilson - The Silent and the Damned

‘What’s she doing, taking these photographs?’ asked Calderón.

‘It’s her work,’ said Falcón. ‘The way she expresses herself.’

‘Taking shots of people’s private distress?’ said Calderón, raising an eyebrow. ‘Is she weird?’

‘She told me that she was interested in the private, inner struggle,’ said Falcón. ‘You know, that voice that Sr Vázquez talked about. The one nobody ever hears.’

‘But what’s she doing with it?’ asked Calderón. ‘Recording the face but not the voice…I mean, what’s the point?’

‘The voice is loud in the head but silent to the outside world,’ said Falcón. ‘She’s interested in the distressed person’s need to be out in the open…amongst his fellow strangers, walking his pain out of himself.’

They exchanged a look, left the room and went into Mario’s bedroom. Calderón gave him back the contact sheet.

‘What’s all that bullshit about?’ said Calderón.

‘I’m telling you what she said.’

‘Is she getting some…vicarious experience from this?’

‘She’s got a photograph of me on her wall,’ said Falcón, still seething. ‘A blow-up of me staring down into the river from the Puente de Isabel II, for God’s sake.’

‘She’s like some paparazzo of the emotions,’ said Calderón, wincing.

‘Photographers are strange people,’ said Falcón, who was one himself. ‘Their currency is perfect moments from real life. They define their idea of perfection to themselves and then pursue it…like prey. If they’re lucky they find an image that intensifies their idea, makes it more real…but in the end they’re capturing ephemera.’

‘Ghosts, internal struggles, captured ephemera…’ said Calderón. ‘This is unusable stuff.’

‘Let’s wait for the autopsy. That should give us something tangible to work with. In the meantime I’d like to find Sergei, the gardener, who was physically the closest person to the crime scene and discovered the body.’

‘There’s another ghost,’ said Calderón.

‘We should search his rooms down at the bottom of the garden.’

Calderón nodded.

‘Maybe I’ll go across and take a look at Sra Krugman’s photographs while you search the gardener’s rooms,’ said Calderón. ‘I want to see these shots full size.’

Falcón tracked the judge with his eyes back to the second crime scene. Calderón exchanged words with the Médico Forense, rolling his mobile in his hand like a bar of soap. He trotted down the stairs in a hurry. Falcón shrugged away the unsettling thought that Calderón seemed oddly self-conscious and keen, which was not part of his usual knowing style.

As he sweated his way down the unshaded lawn Falcón noticed a pile of blackened paper in the grill on the paved barbecue area. The uppermost paper had been crumpled and was thoroughly burned so that it disintegrated at the touch of his pen. Beneath it were pages that had not been so completely consumed by fire, on which there was discernible handwriting.

He called Felipe down to the garden with his forensic kit. He looked it over wearing his custom-made magnified goggles.

‘We’re not going to save much of this,’ he said, ‘if anything.’

‘They look like letters to me,’ said Falcón.

‘I can only make out partial words, but the writing has that rounded look of a female hand. I’ll take a shot of it before we wreck it.’

‘Give me the partial words you can see.’

Felipe called out some words which at least confirmed the language as Spanish and he took a couple of shots with his digital camera. The blackened paper collapsed as he dug in deeper with his pen. He found a partial line ‘ en la escuela ’ – in the school – but nothing else. At the bottom of the pile he came across paper of a different quality. Felipe lifted some filigree remains from the blackened flakes.

‘This is a modern photograph,’ he said. ‘They’re very flammable. The chemicals blister as the paper underneath burns and all that’s left is this. Older photographs don’t burn so easily. The paper is thicker and higher quality.’

He teased out some paper which was glossy black and curled at the edges but still white in the middle. He turned it over to reveal a black-and-white shot of a girl’s head and shoulders. She was standing in front of a woman whose presence had been reduced to a ringed hand resting on the girl’s clavicle.

‘Can we date it?’

‘This sort of stock hasn’t been used commercially in Spain for years, but it could have been developed privately or come from abroad where they are still using that kind of stuff. So…tricky,’ said Felipe. ‘The girl’s hairstyle looks a bit old-fashioned.’

‘Sixties, seventies?’ asked Falcón.

‘Maybe. She certainly doesn’t look like a girl from the pueblo. And the woman’s hand on her shoulder doesn’t look as if it’s done any manual labour. I’d have said they were well-off foreigners. I’ve got some cousins out in Bolivia who look a bit like this, you know, just not up to date.’

They bagged the piece of photograph, found some shade and cleaned themselves up.

‘You burn old letters and photographs if you’re putting your house in order,’ said Felipe.

‘Or your head,’ said Falcón.

‘Maybe he did kill himself and we’re just imagining things.’

‘Why would you burn this sort of stuff?’ said Falcón. ‘Painful memories. A part of your life you don’t want your wife to find out about…’

‘Or a part of your life you don’t want your son to find out about,’ said Felipe, ‘when you die.’

‘Perhaps it could be dangerous material if it falls into the wrong hands.’

‘Whose hands?’

‘I’m just saying, you burn this sort of thing to get rid of it because it’s either painful, embarrassing or dangerous.’

‘It could just be a picture of his wife as a girl,’ said Felipe. ‘What would that mean?’

‘Have we tracked down Sra Vega’s parents yet?’ asked Falcón. ‘They should really be looking after the boy, rather than Sra Jiménez.’

Felipe told him that Pérez was working on it. They went down to the gardener’s house. The door was not locked. The two rooms were stuffy, airless and stripped of all possessions. The mattress was half off the bed as if he kept something under there, or perhaps just slept on it outside. The only other furniture in the bedroom was an upturned box, used as a bedside table. The kitchen had a gas ring and bottle of butane. There was no fridge and only dried food out on a sideboard.

‘The staff didn’t see much of the Vega luxury,’ said Felipe.

‘Better than living in Tres Mil Viviendas,’ said Falcón. ‘Why run?’

‘Allergic to police,’ said Felipe. ‘These guys get asthmatic when they see 091 on the wall of the phone booth. A dead body…well, you don’t hang around waiting for the disaster to happen, do you?’

‘Or he might have seen something or someone,’ said Falcón. ‘He must have been aware of Sr Vega burning his papers, probably saw him standing out in the garden in his bare feet. Maybe he even saw what happened last night.’

‘I’ll take some prints and run them through the computer,’ said Felipe.

Falcón walked back up to the house, his shirt sticking to his back. He called Pérez on his mobile.

‘Where are you?’ asked Falcón.

‘Now, I’m in the hospital, Inspector Jefe.’

‘I left you searching the garage and the outside of the house.’

‘I did that.’

‘What about all the burnt papers in the barbecue?’

‘They were burnt. I made a note of it.’

‘Did you hurt yourself?’

‘No.’

‘What are you doing in the hospital then?’